Category: Political Science

…democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant.  We provide a test of a key aspect of our model using data from "La Violencia", a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946-1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties.  Consistent with our results, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, we show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.

Here is the paper, here is a non-gated version.

Take that word in the broad rather than narrow sense.  Jim Kalb writes:

As time went on the movement followed the usual shift in emphasis from
quality to quantity: from the traditionalist, libertarian and
anti-totalitarian ideas that got it started to the forces that gave it
the means to exercise power: politic and well-connected
neoconservatives, spokesmen and operatives who could influence and
mobilize masses of religious and populist voters, and those simply
interested in power as such.  GWB’s big government borderless
“conservatism” brought that process to a conclusion: no conservative
principle at all, just power, political management, and scraps of
liberal and conservative ideology made up into banners.  At this point,
with the failure of the Bush administration, the whole thing seems to
have come to an end.  It seems that those who want to resist the reign
of quantity and the managerial state, and work toward a better way of
life, need to start again from basics.  We are back in 1945.

There is much truth to this.  As to the future, Brad Thompson offers an Objectivist viewpoint.  Here is my take on reviving classical liberalism.

A new article in Psychology Today suggests the following:

†¢    Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color.  Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional.  Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
†¢    Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I’m the decider."
†¢    Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
†¢    Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
†¢    Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
†¢    Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
†¢    When people are prompted to think about death–a state of mind  psychologists call mortality salience–they actually become more conservative.
†¢    Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

I can assure you my room is messy, and I wonder if more finely grained categories would have been useful.

Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon argue we are too quick to pick a fight:

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks.  Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics.  For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths:  About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average.  In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war.  Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found:  All the biases in our list favor hawks.  These psychological impulses–only a few of which we discuss here–incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations.  In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.

Since the first-best, optimal number of wars is zero, this is correct.  The more difficult and also more important question is whether "the good guys" fight too many or too few wars, given this strong martial propensity of "the bad guys," and treating the bad guys as the first movers.  Another bias is that some "just wars" (but can they succeed?) remain unfought, usually when we do not care much about the slaughter of "out-group innocents," as evidenced by Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, etc.  The U.S. entered World War II too late rather than too early, and did too little to limit the Holocaust.

Of course we need to adjust any estimate by the probability that we are sometimes "the bad guys" rather than "the good guys."

Here is one critical comment, here is Matt Yglesias.  Dan Drezner offers commentary.

Comments are open, but the discussion will be better if we consider the biases rather than debating the merits of particular wars.

The ever-inquisitive Matt Yglesias asks why the successful social welfare policies of smaller countries cannot be scaled up to a larger level.  I don’t know of serious work on this question (there are papers on whether smallness is an advantage for economic growth, but that is not the same issue), so we should not jump to hasty conclusions.  Nonetheless I can think of a few factors:

1. Perhaps homogeneity is the advantage, not smallness per se.  So a Denmark of 150 million people might work quite well, if only there were 150 million Danes.  There aren’t, and if we imagine the Danish population growing they might not stay so homogeneous in nature.  Peer effects dissipate or perhaps turn negative at some scale.

2. Perhaps the ability to dispense with federalism helps government efficiency in small countries.  I favor federalism for larger units, such as the United States, but I think of it as a necessary evil.  Singapore and New Zealand don’t have much federalism, nor should they.

3. Concentration of power in a major city may account for some of the special properties of small countries.  It is often striking how many of the small-country elites went to the same high school, and they can strike efficient political bargains relatively easily; postwar Austria has been cited as an example.  Larger size makes these Coasian bargains impossible.  Note that Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo are all far more important than the second cities in those countries. 

4. Feelings of social solidarity are limited across space and across numbers, and this simply won’t change.

5. Orderly countries aren’t very interested in larger political units.  The Nordic countries have in the past existed in larger political confederations, but somebody always was persnickety enough to break away.  Many of the Nordic countries, even today, are relatively skeptical about the EU.

Addendum: Comments on this post seem to be working now…

In today’s Brazil, federalism and decentralisation have become a question of uncontrolled flows of money from the central state to the provinces.  10 per cent of the municipalities of Brazil do not raise any tax at all.  At the same time, 89 per cent of them derive 95 per cent or more of their income from transfer payments from Brasilia, or from the government of their federal state.

Here is the link, which argues, correctly, that Brazil has too much dysfunctional federalism.  I might add that infrastructure here is another (related) problem, read the post above this one.  For a country of Brazil’s importance, the quality of the roads, airports, and so on is abysmal.  Did I mention that only about fifteen million of the voters pay income taxes?

Just as the Review and the political science profession in general failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Review before
1914 conveyed little sense that a cataclysmic world war was imminent.  The
journal did publish an article on the Balkans (Harris 1913), but it did
not focus on the larger power transitions taking place in Europe until
publication of a rather realist analysis of “The Causes of the Great
War” after World War I had begun (Turner 1915).  In this same time
period, the Review was filled with articles putting a favorable
emphasis on international law as a means toward peace.

So what are we economists missing now?  Hat tip to Dan Drezner.

But possibly the most important problem is that the areas where
liberals and libertarians agree tend to be on issues that are mostly
decided locally in America, like school curricula, law enforcement
tactics, and marriage law.

Here is more, from Porthos.

Julian Sanchez has an excellent round-up; as usual Virginia Postrel has one of the sharpest contributions.

First perhaps libertarians are not very numerous and thus they are playing against immovable opponents in the relevant political game.  That is, they won’t get anything back from Democrats.  That also suggests their support is worth nothing, and the decision can be viewed in that framework.  I suspect this is the relevant case.

Alternatively, perhaps libertarians are numerous enough to get some concessions from Democrats.  They would be playing a "threat-bluff-bargain" game with the two major parties.  Isn’t a mixed strategy usually best in these settings?  It becomes a question of "how much" to lean toward a party rather than "whether."  Libertarians would not want Republicans to feel they were abandoned altogether.  In any case the key is to act strong, offer more than you really have, and be prepared to bolt.

Keep also in mind there is a nested game within the so-called "libertarian movement."  Strategies which make sense in a coordinated fashion often fail when there is discord from within.  If libertarians think that the Republicans need to worry about the libertarians bolting, well, I suspect the libertarians have more than a few potential bolters of their own. 

My personal inclination is not to worry too much about such matters.  None of the obvious arguments, even if they appear strong, get us very far toward an answer.

Matt Yglesias reports:

Sebastian Mallaby observes of conservative/libertarian splits that "It’s not just the values of the South that pose a problem. It is the region’s appetite for government."  In particular, "The most solidly red states in the nation tend also to be the most reliant on federal handouts — farm subsidies, water projects and sundry other earmarks.  It’s hard to be the party of small government when you represent the communities that benefit most from big government."

…in less than a year, the lobbying salary commanded by a top Democratic staffer for a middle-rank member of the House has more than doubled, from $180,000 to $400,000.

That is from The New York Times, December 2, Thomas Edsall, p.A27.

1. Maybe not.

2. Human world champion Kramnik vs. Fritz, the chess match starts November 25th.

3. Random thought for the day: I don’t actually know many people like this.  I love reading personal vignettes, if only to remind myself of the diversity of humanity.

4. Wireless power?