Category: Political Science

…the polling places used by voters may influence their choices. One study showed voters in Arizona in 2000 were more likely to support a measure to increase the state sales tax, with the proceeds going to public education, if they voted in a school. Following up, the authors showed subjects images of a church, a school, or a generic building and asked them to “vote” on certain measures. Not only were the respondents more likely to support education measures if they had been shown pictures of schools, but they were also more likely to vote against stem-cell research if they had been shown pictures of churches. American polling places have usually been assigned by state officials on the basis of convenience; this research suggests they could become political battlegrounds in a whole new manner.

Here is more.  So if you are a libertarian, where do you want people to vote?  In front of H&R Block?

For a political leader, not appearing in public can mean:

1. You hate attention.  You are a recluse, like Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger.

2. You are countersignalling.  Your political position (or health) is so secure that you don’t need to show your face.  Was Reagan at times an example?

3. Sheer random noise.  Maybe you are playing chess and haven’t given it much thought.

4. You are dead or dying.

5. Someone else is in charge, and they have yet to figure out the correct message.  Or groups of agents are fighting for control and no one is staging the appearances one way or the other.

6. No one is in charge, and everyone is afraid to appear to be in charge, for fear that the sick guy will recover and come back and squash them.

7. One guy used to run PR, and until he gets better everyone else is clueless and paralyzed.

We can rule out #1, #2, and #3.  Right now I will bet on some mix of #6 and #7.  But is there any point at which the sheer passage of time should push us to believe in #4 and #5?  Note that Raul has not shown his face either.  Are there alternative hypotheses?  The desire for a grand reentrance?  After all, a growing number of Cuban officials are talking of Castro’s return…

"Almost everyone" is not a bad answer.  But perhaps you would like something more precise.  Christian Bjørnskov has developed an index of blame, based on the degree of protectionism in a country’s negotiating position.   He writes:

In total, a number of countries must share responsibility for the breakdown. Brazil and other Third World food exporters probably were too ambitious on behalf of the developed countries, India refused to accept more competition in its comparatively weak industries, and the US position remained opaque while the country for too long hid behind the protectionist positions of other member states. However, the bottom line is that the main culprit – the member bearing most of the responsibility – is the European Union. The problem continues to be that the official policy of the union is controlled by Southern European countries with strong agricultural lobbies – and the policy is therefore rather clearly dictated by Paris. French top politicians have throughout the negotiations ‘protected’ French farmers against cuts in tariffs or support measures – Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both went on air in national media to ensure their voters that France would veto any liberalization – which makes the country the Global Public Enemy Number One. Yet, another part of the story that needs to be told is that other EU members also made an indirect effort. The EU as a whole and traditionally liberalist countries such as the UK and Denmark in particular are all accomplices.

Colombia, a country with virtually no influence, had the highest pro-trade score.  Bjørnskov does discuss the fact that the U.S. took an "easy" pro-trade position (it knew other countries would never agree), but I am not sure how this influenced his calculation of the index scores.

Thanks to Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard for the pointer.

Sometimes an idea comes along that is so neat you wonder why no one
thought of it before. In that vein, Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma
Republican and chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Federal
Financial Management, has introduced a bipartisan bill to create a
Google-like online searchable database of all federal spending.
Currently, said Coburn, there is no way for taxpayers to find out what
the government is paying individuals, groups, localities, and
contractors. "This bill will empower citizen investigators to root out
waste, fraud, and abuse," said Coburn, a leading opponent of pork. The
bill has some heavyweight sponsors, including Republican Sens. John
McCain and Rick Santorum and Democrat Barack Obama.

From USNews.com.  Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.

Number of Mexicans in the USA who voted in the recent (Mexican) Presidental election: 28,000.

I find this to be remarkably low.  58 percent of those voted for Calderon, although presumably the small number of voters corresponds to a strong selection effect rather than a representative sample.

Here is one account, although it does not look into the reasons for non-voting very deeply.  Thanks to Sergio Hernandez for the pointer.

My wife is going away for a couple of weeks and the kids are at camp.  "Won’t you be lonely?," she asked, "The house will be so quiet."  Before I could properly think it through I replied, "Oh no, I’ll enjoy the peace and quiet."  I could tell immediately that this was not the right answer.

[Rep.] Mr. Boehner made a virtue of being friendly with lobbyists, saying that
“absent our personal, longstanding relationships, there is no way for
us to tell” which ones might be corrupt.

That is from the NYT, via CrookedTimber.

Todd Zywicki asks:

I’m looking for literature analyzing academic bureaucracies, especially
from a public choice-type perspective. The parallels with government
bureaucracies seem obvious in terms of empire-building and
budget-maximizing proclivities, but I haven’t been able to turn up any
good resources that gives me a good model and analysis of the problem.

Leave your suggestions in MR comments, also check the unusually quiet VC readers.  I’ll recommend Henry Hansemann on non-profits, plus that JPE article on why tenure allows professors to hire smart people without fear of being laid off because of the new competition.  Who is the market-oriented researcher from the south with all the papers on academic rent-seeking?  Let’s not forget Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry or Buchanan’s Academia in Anarchy, that rant against the 1960s. 

The quest for control is often more important than budget maximization, but arguably the same is true in political bureaucracy as well.  Budget maximization is an overrated hypothesis.  Status also often plays a larger role than budget, especially in research universities.

My view is that the gains from making the most productive people autonomous (i.e., tenure) outweigh the costs from all the resulting nonsense, but of course that is a self-serving attitude.  Unlike in a political bureaucracy, a small percentage of the workers produce most of the valued outputs.  So if many people shirk, tenure doesn’t actually waste that much in terms of resources.

And why do good universities need those silly silly endowments? 

Apart from the part from War and Peace I read on the plane, here is tops:

Above all, a classical liberal needs to identify, expose, and counter
the marketing strategies and tactics that are used to expand
government. Both political parties play up fears in order to sucker us
into ceding money and power. Just as certain citizens’ groups are known
for exposing the false advertising of corporations, we need to expose
the false advertising of politicians.

That is Arnold Kling, here is the full argument.

Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural experiment, the stationing of thousands of diplomats from around the world in New York City. Diplomatic immunity means there was essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations, allowing us to examine the role of cultural norms alone. This generates a revealed preference measure of government officials’ corruption based on real-world behavior taking place in the same setting. We find strong persistence in corruption norms: diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations, and these differences persist over time. In a second main result, officials from countries that survey evidence indicates have less favorable popular views of the United States commit significantly more parking violations, providing non-laboratory evidence on sentiment in economic decision-making. Taken together, factors other than legal enforcement appear to be important determinants of corruption.

Here is the paper.  I might have tried the following:

During a period of diplomatic parking immunity, the average Kuwaiti diplomat to the United Nations racked up 246 parking violations.  No Swedish diplomat had any parking violations.  This paper explores how that might possibly be the case.

www.buyoutbush.com.

How much will be bid from, um…Berkeley?

Gordon Tullock frequently tells me there is no good economic argument for democracy, if we adjust properly for economic variables such as the absolute state of development.  After all, much of the European miracle occurred under non-democratic conditions, not to mention the golden ages of China or modern Singapore.  But now Kevin Grier and Mike Munger argue from the empirics that democracy is better for economic growth.  In particular:

New dictatorships grow very slowly, and very old dictatorships grow very slowly. But durable dictatorships in the middle years actually grow nearly as fast as democracies. A nonlinear specification fits almost exactly.

It is a tricky question which economic models of autocracy this is consistent with (try your hand at this in the comments).  Here is part of the paper’s abstract:

In this paper we study a large unbalanced annual panel of 134 countries covering the period 1950 – 2003. We show that autocracies grow almost one percentage point slower than non-autocracies, holding constant the effect of regime length on growth…

I usually tell Gordon that the costs of keeping out democracy are prohibitive for most contemporary societies; that alone should tip the balance in favor of democracy.  Sources of economic power and sources of political power have to stand in some sort of equilibrium relationship if stability is to persist.  Singapore is an exception because it is a) very small, b) disciplined by world markets to an extreme degree, and c) its citizens realize that its "democracy" would otherwise collapse into identity politics of the three major ethnic groups; they therefore do not demand so much democracy.

Gordon never agrees.  Here is the paper and further discussion.  More importantly, here is Kevin on stereo equipment and tubes.

Michael Cannon, David Boaz, and Will Wilkinson are among the early posters, here is the link.  By the way, here is a Cato paper on George Bush’s constitutional record.

It has been a tough week for writers, here is one obituary.  Here is Wikipedia.  Here is a review of his essay on why Europeans hate Americans.  Revel was probably the most important conservative French thinker of the last thirty or forty years; his writings on food and gastronomy also repay the effort of study.