Category: Political Science

Foreign Policy magazine did a poll, professional "respondents" (who appear to be academics) listed the following top ten names, in order…

Democrat Matt Yglesias writes:

If you did have a progressive president, there’s no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don’t especially care about small government.

Republican David Brooks (see Sunday’s NYT, no free link anymore, but read this good summary, or try this) tells us that George Bush and activist government have saved the Republican Party from irrelevance.

Libertarian Albert Jay Nock titled his book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

But not so fast: I have a simple theory: in any period of time, government grows as large as it can, given available technology and a few cultural constraints.  For better or worse, voters support this growth.  The railroad and electricity were the most significant agents for big government in the twentieth century, toss in the radio for good measure.  Short of technological retrogression and negative economic growth, we should not expect government to ever get smaller.  Just look at the size of welfare states in oil-rich countries. 

But neither does this spell the end of libertarianism.  Some people realize that this process can go too far, as it has in the growth-stunted Western Europe.  In more extreme cases, government can grow so large as to endanger the foundations of civilization. 

The complainers are the libertarians.  They will always lose, and they will always be intellectually important. 

Tom Schelling writes in today’s WSJ:

[Terrorists] will discover, over weeks of arguing that the most effective use of the bomb, from a terrorist perspective, will be for influence.  Possessing a nuclear device, if they can demonstrate possession — and I believe they can, if they have it, without detonating it — will give them something of the status of a nation.  Threatening to use it against military targets, and keeping it intact if the threat is successful, may appeal to them more than expending it in a destructive act.  Even terrorists may consider destroying large numbers of people and structures less satisfying than keeping a major nation at bay.

No permalink is currently available, although it may pop up on the on-line edition.  Also pick up the paper copy for the front-page story about Caroline Hoxby and the recent disputes over her work on educational competition.

Addendum: Here is a link.

Here is the latest by Alberto Alesina and Nicola Scheundeln:

Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of welfare
states, differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we test
whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on
individual preferences. We exploit the "experiment" of German
separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic
system. From 1945 to 1990, East Germans lived under a Communist regime
with heavy state intervention and extensive redistribution. We find
that, after German reunification, East Germans are more in favor of
redistribution and state intervention than West Germans, even after
controlling for economic incentives. This effect is especially strong
for older cohorts, who lived under Communism for a longer time period.
We further find that East Germans’ preferences converge towards those
of West Germans. We calculate that it will take one to two generations
for preferences to converge completely.

Here is Bryan Caplan on The Idea Trap, one of his best pieces.

PoliticalArithmetick.blogspot.com, by Charles Franklin, a political scientist at University of Wisconsin.  How many other people have John Graunt as their hero?   Thanks to J. Bravo for the pointer.

Following up on our earlier discussion of think tanks, Bruce Bartlett offers some analysis. 

I think the smart thing for the US state department to do today is build a game about Islam but make it a democracy. And set it up so that every 16-year-old from Morocco to Pakistan can go into that world when they get a computer. Not say anything overt about democracy but have them play — have them vote, for example.

I saw this quotation on the ever-excellent kottke.org.  Here is his source, on video game economics.  Here is the source interview, worth a read.  Here is Edward Castronova’s forthcoming book on video game economics.

Addendum: Speaking of kottke.org, they offer a good link on what makes shy people shy, and can they change?

Second addendum: A reader draws my attention to this rather grisly video game.

The electoral deadlock in Germany may mean a "Grand Coalition" with its two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats.  This is the likely outcome if neither of the major parties can assemble a coalition with the minor parties; some minor/major alliances simply are not possible, for either political or ideological reasons.

Looking to public choice theory, how will a Grand Coalition operate?

Models of proportional representation typically allow for multiple equilibria, but a plausible outcome involves a trade between a major party and an allied minor party.  The minor party will promise to support the major party in forming a coalition, if the major party makes one or two key policy concessions.  The distribution of gains will depend on bargaining power.  Will the major party have other possible coalition allies?  Does the minor party crave power, or would it rather stake out a purist stance on policy, and risk being left outside the coalition?  Note that once the coalition is in place the minor party often has a difficult time defecting.  Minor party officials come to enjoy the perks of power.  Their threats to bring down the coalition often are not credible.  So the resulting government often holds power snugly and governs sluggishly.

When no minor party is available for the coalition, the terms of the bargain shift.

First, a Grand Coalition usually means that the two major parties have roughly equal electoral strength.  If the coalition collapses, and a government must re-form, and either party could come out on top in the new bargain.  Therefore the (slightly) weaker coalition member does not have a very strong incentive to hold the coalition together.

Second, the two major parties often have opposing platforms.  So the initial policy compromise might stop either party from doing much of anything.  That is one reason to expect stalemate.  It also means that the (slightly) stronger party doesn’t gain much from the coalition; it cannot promote its agenda.  There is also the danger of many minor parties proliferating at the fringes, given the centrism of the joint coalition.  This lowers the returns to holding power at the center, as these minor parties will cut into your future electoral support.

The bottom line: Two parties in a Grand Coalition will reap low gains from trade.  Neither party will much mind if the Grand Coalition collapses.  Stability is "knife-edge."  But the parties therefore might be willing to take more chances.  What do they have to lose?  A Grand Coalition does not mean certain policy gridlock (in contrast to this pessimistic view). 

And let us say that both parties recognize the need for reforms, but are held back by voters.  An arrangement where accountability is low and "each party can blame the other" might be exactly what is needed.

To cite reality for just a moment, Germany had a "Grand Coalition" from 1966 to 1969, and this was no obvious disaster.  Student revolts aside, many Germans consider these years a golden age. The earlier Grand Coalition passed important economic legislation in 1967 and restricted civil liberties in a controversial manner.  Modern German politics is often slow, but in relative terms this period was not a time of gridlock.

Addendum: Here is a longish piece I once wrote on proportional representation; note Alex’s contribution on referenda as well.

Here is one good take on today’s election.  My view of the bottom line?  Most Germans are sick of Schroeder, and ready to vote for someone else, but they run to third parties.  Wessis still have cultural inhibitions about voting for Ossis, even though they won’t admit to it in public.  We don’t yet know which coalition is most likely, but go to the excellent Medienkritik site for updates.  Here is another good source.

Combine this with the electoral results from New Zealand and you get a simple hypothesis: we don’t have better economic policies because voters don’t want them.

It is going on now, many say "too close to call," here is The New Zealand Herald (with updates on their home page), and yes comments are open, add what you know, and I will update this post in the morning.  National Party candidate Don Brash is, to the best of my knowledge, the best candidate running for a leadership position in any major country in some time.  And of course Sunday is the election in Germany…

Addendum: The vote is very close.  This is mixed member proportional representation, so the final outcome will depend on negotiating a coalition with the minor parties.  This could take weeks, with (boo-hoo) Winston Peters as the likely kingmaker.  Here is the voting; note that ACT is the libertarian party but they have only 1.5 percent.

Hypothesis A: Successors to tyrants will be less fierce, because tyrants themselves fear fierce wanna-bee underlings. 

Hypothesis B: Hereditary monarchy does not breed for love of power, therefore successors will become less fierce than the first usurper monarch.  Bryan Caplan attributes this view to Gordon Tullock.

Hypothesis C: Any method of orderly succession is better than recurring contests for national leadership.

Hypothesis D: Over time orderly succession becomes difficult to maintain, given the lack of fierceness of the rulers.

Hypothesis E: If you can prevent repeated coup d’etats, you are on your way toward economic growth.

Here is a Jonathan Klick paper on autocracy.  Here is a Daniel Sutter piece on the transition from autocracy.  Here is another painting by Neo Rauch.

Why don’t governments handle all crises well?  Read Brad DeLong’s catalog of charges on Katrina.  I can think of a few systematic reasons for institutional failure:

1. The event is often small-probability in nature.

2. The event has very negative consequences, and we don’t have optimal punishments for those who get it wrong.

3. Many crisis-related events and required decisions happen quickly in immediate sequence.  First, it is hard to get the decisions right, second it is even harder to look good, given some inevitable mistakes.

4. Media scrutiny is intense, and voters care about the issue.  This encourages ex post overreactions and overinvestments in symbolic fixes, especially when combined with #1.

5. A crisis is, by definition, large.  This puts federalism, whatever its other merits, at a disadvantage.  No one is sure who is responsible for what, or how a chain of command should operate.

All of these seem to have operated in New Orleans, plus they were combined with one of our worst-functioning local governments and an administration especially weak on the issue of accountability.  My colleague Roger Congleton has a paper on the public choice of crisis management.  This is an underexplored topic, so feel free to suggest other readings in the comments.

Matthew Kahn asks:

1. How much did the people of the New Orleans metro area invest in their own levees? Given that property owners and public safety in this metro area are the main beneficiary of such investments, why wasn’t this sufficient incentive for the Mayor and the metro area’s other political leaders to tax citizens collect the money and invest in better, more modern levees?

Here is the full post, which includes three other to-the-point questions.  I am not into the blame game, but Randall Parker’s recent post also raises questions about the underfunding of New Orleans local government.  Of course the Feds messed up too.

Are democratic governments simply not very risk averse when it comes to very bad, low probability events?  The model behind this conclusion is simple.  Politicians would have to spend the money on protection no matter what, and lose the benefits of spending that cash elsewhere with p = 1.  The chance of reelection goes up only with a small probability, namely if the bad event happens and voters can tell their representatives were suitably cautious.  Why not instead spend the money with a higher chance of boosting reelection prospects?  The key stylized fact is that if a politician messes up very badly, there is no penalty worse than removal from office, which is a penalty (roughly) fixed in value.  And since the value of holding office may not fall in proportion to the suffering caused by the disaster, politicians’ utility maximization will not bring optimal spending either.

Addendum: David Bernstein has some good information on federal spending cuts.  And there is also a complicated story about overreaction ex post, although without necessarily doing much useful, read Daniel Drezner.

Courtesy of Kevin Drum, read the whole thing.  Hindsight is easy, but what should FEMA be doing?

My view is the following.  Many levees are genuine public goods, and should receive government support, from the federal government (e.g., Army Corp; here is a brief history of their involvement) if need be although perhaps not ideally.  FEMA should not be in the business of flood insurance, nor should FEMA reimburse local governments for snow plowing.  Here is a Cato critique of FEMA.  Here is a libertarian article on why a limited governmental response to the Chicago fire was best.  Here is another libertarian critique.  Here is an AEI article that FEMA invests too much in earthquake safety.  Here is an argument that FEMA should not have been made part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Here is a recent piece on cuts to levee subsidies; the news will hurt the Republicans.  Here is a short piece on how revenue from airport privatization could have been used to shore up New Orleans levees.

Libertarian readers, do you care to argue the levee should not have been subsidized?  Do you favor real privatization, not as a Port Authority or Federal Reserve may be private, but in the true market sense?  (Here is a short history of the Louisiana levee authorities; their status has evolved over time.)  If you take that position, you have a few alternatives:

1. We rely too much on unreliable levees, and privatization/non-subsidization would reveal their true social costs and induce people to move elsewhere.

2. A privatized, non-subsidized levee would engage in a successful long-term contract with city residents; see the Demsetz-Williamson debate.  The government still would have to force residents to make the relevant tax payments, for free rider reasons.

3. A levee contract could be written without use of coercive taxation; see this piece on assurance contracts.

4. A private levee authority would invest in water safety out of fear of being sued.  Furthermore these ex post legal incentives would be reliable and would not involve more government intervention than ex ante regulatory incentives.

5. A private levee authority would be forced by its insurance company to build good protection and also hold huge capital reserves.  Their cost of capital and costs of production would remain lower than the government’s.  You can hold this position in conjunction with #3, or believe that coercive taxation would remain necessary.  But in any case it probably requires reliance on #4.

I am not willing to defend any of these five positions, but what do you say readers?  The current government system, obviously, does not have a sterling record.  Comments are open.