Category: Political Science

The tax code will grow more complicated, not simpler, because the complexity of the tax code is a major factor in creating public resentment of the tax system which, again, is key to gaining political support for lowering the top rates.

There is more, read the whole post, entitled "Big Government Conservatism is Here to Stay."

The Indian magazine The Week (Nov.7 issue) polled 1,274 people in ten cities, and found that Indira Gandhi remains a political idol. 

69 percent of the people wish they could vote for her today.

54 percent believe that she would go to war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

47 percent approve of "The Emergency," her suspension of civil liberties; only 38 percent oppose it.

67 percent believe that the Nehru-Gandhi family should be in politics.

Indira’s two greatest achievements are seen as victory in the 1971 Indo-Pak war and nationalizing the banking system.

Here is my previous post entitled "Are Indian Voters Irrational?"

My question: Does Karl Rove understand Indian politics better than we think?

Political scientist Robert Putnam made news a few years ago with Bowling Alone, where Putnam claimed that American community has been in decline. Putnam’s book draws its title from the following passage:

Whether or not bowling beats balloting in the eyes of most Americans, bowling teams illustrate yet another vanishing form of social capital… league bowling, by requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances, represented a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by the occasional pickup game.

Tim Hallett, a colleague of mine, his dissertation advisor Gary Alan Fine and graduate student Mike Sauder decided to see if people really bowled alone. They recently published a summary of their findings in the magazine Society. Fine, Hallett and Sauder write: “As occasional bowlers – although not in leagues – we asked a simple question: Do Americans really bowl alone, and what, if anything, does it mean?”

To answer that question, they went bowling and observed over 800 bowlers at six Chicago area bowling alleys. What did they find? Less than 1% of the people seen bowling actually bowled alone. In interviews, only 13% said they had bowled alone during the past year. What about those loners? Were the solo bowlers introverted and anti-social? To the contrary, 12 out of 22 interviewees who admitted to bowling alone did so to practice so they could do well in bowling leagues. In other words, bowling alone correlates with being in a bowling league.

To be fair, Putnam himself admitted bowling might be social. But he seems to have underestimated the social side of modern bowling. A lot of bowling alleys throw parties and turn their lanes into disco style social clubs. It is also common for all kinds of clubs and groups to socialize at bowling alleys. So maybe bowling leagues are on the decline, but Americans don’t bowl alone.

The well-known median voter theorem suggests that the two major party candidates should adopt arbitrarily close positions. The left- and right-wing parties each move just short of the center to pick up swing voters. It also suggests that elections should be extremely close. The former prediction is clearly falsified (there are real differences between Bush and Kerry), but the latter was not the last time around. Endogenous voter participation, of course, can account for both results. Elections will be very competitive but without policy convergence. If a candidate moves too close to the center, his base decides to stay at home.

Of course few past elections have been very very close, Goldwater and McGovern being two cases in point. Parties may have strategic reasons to run suicide candidates, or primaries may not reflect a rational decision-making process. Candidates also may misjudge which strategy maximizes the number of expected electoral college votes.

But will candidates and parties make these mistakes in the future? Don’t parties care about electability more than ever before? Doesn’t information technology (not to mention betting markets) give us an unparalleled measure of voter opinion? Shouldn’t we take the postulate of hyper-competitive political markets seriously?

The pessimist might suggest we are entering a future where most Presidential elections are arbitrarily close. In other words, the courts would choose the President every time, to the detriment of democratic legitimacy. Over time we might assign this task to an elected governmental body more decisive than the Electoral College, such as the Senate.

Alternatively, voters might have reasons to rebel against a tendency for very close elections. Some voters simply want someone to win (lose) by a clear margin. Other voters like to say they supported the victor. Perhaps Bush is campaigning in some Kerry states (e.g., New Jersey) simply to appear as a likely winner and thus capture these votes.

An article in the Hindu Times suggested that all the American undecideds will break one way or the other before the election, giving us a landslide for one candidate. If that is the case, some portion of the vote is inherently winner-take-all. Political choices will remain “lumpy” in certain regards and our future will remain (quasi-) democratic. This likely means that each candidate will be playing a gambling strategy across alternative non-median policy positions. Political competition can look as perfect as can be on the supply side, but the demand side can force politicians to take strategic chances. The median voter will still go home at night fed up. Not to mention the non-median voter, such as yours truly.

The betting markets in Mombai, as reported on November 1, have John Kerry favored to win the election. The price ratio is 1.05 to .85, as given by Bombay Times. At Tradesports.com, of course, Bush is currently favored with a share price in the range of 53-54.

India has been a functioning democracy since Independence, so why does it not have a higher standard of living? Why haven’t Indian voters opted for the kind of wealth-maximizing policies that have vaulted Singapore to a much higher standard of living? Have they in recent times, or are Indian voters especially irrational among democracies?

Here are a few hypotheses:

1. The real economic problem is local. Good policy at the national level won’t solve India’s fundamental problems, which include poorly defined property rights and corruption. Indian voters choose good leaders, but real change will require much slower piecemeal reforms at the micro-level.

2. Indian voters are just simply, plain, flat, downright irrational.

3. Indian voters seek to perpetuate the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty in some form. This leads them to choose from a narrow subsection of the elite. Indian economic policy has improved as this elite has moved away from socialism and has had greater exposure to market-based ideas.

4. Centrist Indian voters have evolved into rationality. Indians once elected socialists, but the current Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is arguably the best man in the world for the job [TC: he wasn’t exactly directly elected…]. India does not improve more because Singh is constrained by other parties, which court irrational views at the fringes.

5. Singh is an accident, and India will likely return to leaders who reject the idea of wealth creation [but do note that Rao and Rajiv Gandhi were also pro-market reformers to some extent].

6. The real democratization story concerns the rise of “lower-caste” politicians in the 1990s, and the waning power of the Anglicized Brahmin elites. This will mean either:

a) The lower castes will choose future leaders unwisely and pursue a politics of resentment.

b) The lower castes will be forced to “own” Indian government to a greater extent. Their politicians also will be led toward pro-market reforms, given the nature of the problems they will face. India will become stronger and more unified in the long run, thereby making market reforms more wide-ranging and also more durable.

Yes many of these are contradictory but can they all be true?

Consider this passage:

Establishment politicians don’t have solutions that work in the real world because they aren’t asking the tough question: “Why are jobs becoming scarce? Why do we have so much downsizing and so many corporate mergers?”

The answer is too much regulation and too much government spending. In the 1980s, the number of federal regulators fell from about 122,000 to barely 100,000. The private sector added 3,500,000 jobs as a consequence. The loss of each federal regulator resulted in the creation of more than 150 new jobs, enough to hire the ex-regulator, most of the unemployed, and some of the able-bodied poor. The nation prospered!

From 1987 to 1992, the number of regulators swelled once more to pre-1980 levels. The 3.5 million newly-created jobs were destroyed as a result. The number of regulators has continued to increase, costing additional jobs as well. Was your job among them? Will you be unemployed when the next wave of government regulation hits?

Where does one start? Shall I note that corporate mergers are not per se undesirable, nor is downsizing a source of job loss? Or should I note that the growth of the 1980s was not driven by the (supposed) loss of 22,000 jobs of regulators (N.B.: I cannot verify the numbers)? Or shall we move to the next paragraph? Throughout most of the 1990s employment rose and the degree of regulation rose as well. More generally, the extent of government regulation is not a major variable driving employment fluctuations, although it does influence long-run real wages.

Matt is right to think that the world will read an LP vote as sympathy for smaller government, no matter how off-base or crazy an LP candidate might be. Nonetheless I must offer p = 0 when I ponder the chance that I vote for Badnarik. If I don’t like a picture, I’m not going to hang it on my wall. I gladly supported Ed Clark in 1980, let’s hope that the LP once again puts up a serious candidate.

Transparency International just published its new corruption index:

Countries with a score of higher than 9, with very low levels of perceived corruption, are predominantly rich countries, namely Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland. “But the poorest countries, most of which are in the bottom half of the index, are in greatest need of support in fighting corruption,” said Eigen.

On the basis of data from sources that were used for both the 2003 and 2004 index, since last year an increase in perceived corruption can be observed for Bahrain, Belize, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Oman, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, and Trinidad and Tobago.

On the same basis, a fall in corruption was perceived in Austria, Botswana, Czech Republic, El Salvador, France, Gambia, Germany, Jordan, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

In absolute terms, the biggest losers are Bangladesh, Haiti, Nigeria, Chad, Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Paraguay.

Here is the press release, which links to the original study and some charts.

The index appears to have had an impact:

Governments as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Cameroon and Bosnia-Herzegovina have started or stepped up anti-corruption programmes as a result of publicity generated by the index, Berlin- based Transparency International (TI) says. South Korea has even pledged to reach position 10 or above by 2007 – a tall order, as Seoul was ranked 50th last year.

On the negative side, the Financial Times asks whether such indices simply scare off investment in the poorer countries, but of course this is the reason why the index works at all.

In United States presidential elections, the incumbent party’s fortunes depend significantly on recent economic conditions, as numerous studies have shown. Many details of how economic voting takes place, however, are still not well understood. Here we present evidence on four issues. 1) Which is more important for determining people’s votes, national or local economic conditions? 2) What time frame do people consider in economic voting? 3) Which demographic groups are most sensitive to the economy in their voting behavior? 4) How does economic voting depend on the political context–in particular, whether a candidate is running for re-election, and whether the incumbent party also controls Congress? Our study includes the first county-level analysis of economic voting in presidential elections. We find the answers to our four questions are: 1) national conditions, by far; 2) the most recent year; 3) blacks, females, and the non-elderly; and 4) no.

Here is the full article.

“Flu Vaccines Abundant and Free on Capitol Hill,” is the headline in today’s on-line Washington Post.

While many Americans search in vain for flu shots, members and employees of Congress are able to obtain them quickly and at no charge from the Capitol’s attending physician, who has urged all 535 lawmakers to get the vaccines even if they are young and healthy.

I can (sometimes) see the efficiency rationale for this, but it is funny to see our Representatives try to defend their special treatment:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), 62, said in an interview yesterday: “I haven’t done it yet, but I want to. We’re not in the priority category” set by the CDC. “But I think the [Capitol’s] doctor makes a good case. We can pick it up and spread it” through interactions with constituents.

Here is the article.