Category: Political Science
*Why Congress*
By Philip A. Wallach, of the American Enterprise Institute. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a review of the book. A very good book. As I read Phil, he is suggesting that Congress is even a wee bit underrated. You can buy it here.
How effective was the IAEA?
Here is the Open AI call for international regulation, most of all along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency. I am not in general opposed to this approach, but I think it requires very strong bilateral supplements, from the United States of course. Which in turn requires U.S. supremacy in the area, as was the case with nuclear weapons. From a 564 pp. official work on the topic:
For nearly forty years after its birth in 1957 the IAEA remained essentially irrelevant to the nuclear arms race. (p.22)
There is also this:
However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was not the failure of the IAEA’s functions as a ‘pool’ or ‘bank’ or supplier of nuclear material that inflicted the most serious blow on the organization, on its safeguards operation and eventually on Cole himself. For a variety of reasons, the Agency’s chief patron, the USA, chose to arrange nuclear supplies bilaterally rather than through the IAEA. One reason was that the IAEA had been unable to develop an effective safeguards system. Another was that in a bilateral arrangement it was the US Administration, under the watchful eyes of Congress, that chose the bilateral partner rather than leaving the choice to an international organization that would have to respond to the needs of any Member State whatever its political system, persuasion or alliance. But the most serious setback came in 1958 when, for overriding political reasons, the USA chose the bilateral route in accepting the safeguards of EURATOM as equivalent to — in other words as an acceptable substitute for — those of the IAEA.
It is frequently suggested that the IAEA has been partially captured by the nuclear sector itself. I do not consider that bad news, but it is a sobering thought for those expecting too much from this approach. Do note that it took years to set up the agency, and furthermore when North Korea wanted to acquire nuclear weapons the country simply left the agency and broke its earlier agreement. Perhaps the greatest gain from this approach is that the non-crazy nations have a systematic multilateral framework to work within, should they decide to defer to the external, bilateral pressure from the United States?
On the other side, my fear is that the international agreement will lead to excess regulation at the domestic level.
There is also this:
The fact that Iraq’s nuclear weapon programme had been under way for several years, perhaps a decade, without being detected by the IAEA, led to sharp criticism of the Agency and posed the most serious threat to the credibility of its safeguards since they had first been applied some 30 years earlier.
All of these issues could use much more intelligent discussion.
Islam and human capital in historical Spain
We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, via a loyal MR reader.
The Politics of Academic Research
We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and demand for research. We find that research in Economics and Political Science displays a liberal slant, while Finance and Accounting research exhibits a conservative slant, and these differences cannot be accounted for by variations in research topics. We also find that the ideological slant of researchers is positively correlated with that of their Ph.D. institution and research conducted outside universities appears to cater more to the political party of the current President. Finally, political donations data confirms that the ideological slant we measure based on think tank citations aligns with the political values of researchers. Our findings have important implications for the structure of research funding.
Here is the full article by Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner.
*The Fall of the Turkish Model*
The author is Cihan Tuğal, and the subtitle is How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, though the book is more concretely a comparison across Egypt and Tunisia as well, with frequent remarks on Iran. Here is one excerpt:
This led to what Kevan Harris has called the ‘subcontractor state’: an economy which is neither centralized under a governmental authority not privatized and liberalized. The subcontractor state has decentralized its social and economic roles without liberalizing the economy or even straightforwardly privatizing the state-owned enterprises. As a result, the peculiar third sector of the Iranian economy has expanded in rather complicated and unpredictable ways. Rather than leading to liberalization privatization under revolutionary corporatism intensified and twisted the significance of organization such as the bonyads…Privatization under the populist-conservative Ahmedinejad exploited the ambiguities of the tripartite division of the economy…’Privatization’ entailed the sale of public assets not to private companies but to nongovernmental public enterprises (such as pension funds, the bonyads and military contractors).
This book is one useful background source for the current electoral process in Turkey.
Claims about atheists
The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.
The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.
HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.
And while they don’t lead the pack when it comes to attending a local political meeting, they only trail Hindus by four percentage points.
…atheists take part in plenty of political actions – 1.52 to be exact. The overall average in the entire sample was .91 activities. The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American.
And this:
The results here are clear and unambiguous – atheists are more likely to engage in political activities at every level of education compared to Protestants, Catholics or Jews. For instance, an atheist with a high school diploma reports .7 activities, that’s at least .2 higher than any other religious group.
Political engagement is clearly related to education, though. The more educated one is, the more likely they are to be politically active. But at every step of the education scale, atheists lead the way. Sometimes those gaps are incredibly large. A college educated atheist engages in 1.7 activities, it’s only 1.05 activities for a college educated evangelical.
From Ryan Burge, here is the full data analysis.
Sentences of the Day
The Washington Post on the plan to refurbish Union Station in DC:
The federal environmental review of the project, which began in 2015, is at least three years behind schedule. Once the federal approval process is complete, a design phase is likely to take several years, project officials said, possibly followed by 13 years of construction.
A good example of the Ezra Klein point about the costs of everything bagel liberalism. By the way, the push to eliminate more than a thousand parking spots at the station seems counter-productive. I’m not a fan of parking minimums but in typical liberal fashion that has been turned into an anti-parking, anti-car crusade regardless of context. In fact, a railroad station is precisely where you do want parking to avoid the last mile(s) problem and encourage rail use.
India fact of the day
India’s state capacity recently has surpassed the global average.
Pinch yourself! Here are various Berggruen governance indices. Here is the interactive site.
Is Switzerland right-wing? (from my email)
Dear Tyler,
I came across this study today (https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_236420EB8209.P001/REF) that claims that Switzerland is one of the most right-wing (at least nominally) countries in Europe.The federal government has been in the hands of the right since 1848.The federal parliament is currently dominated by the right.26 out of 26 cantonal parliaments are controlled by the right.25 out of 26 canton governments (with the exception of the Jura) are in the hands of the right.Neither the parliament nor the national government has ever been controlled by the left.
How does it fit with your model of Switzerland?
Still an undeservedly overlooked country!
That is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski.
Sentences to ponder
Our results indicate that siblings are associated with more conservative meritocracy beliefs.
Here is the full paper by Joseph J. Merry and Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*Voters as Mad Scientists*, by Bryan Caplan
This new collection has some of Bryan’s best material, and perhaps also his best single piece of writing ever. Here is an excerpt from “My Simplistic Theory of Left and Right“:
This:
1. Leftists are anti-market. On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes. No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?”
2. Rightists are anti-leftist. On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists. No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”
Yes, this story is uncharitable and simplistic. But clarifying. Communists and moderate Democrats are vastly different, but they have something in common: Free markets get on their nerves. Nazis and moderate Republicans are vastly different, but they too have something in common: Leftists get on their nerves. Within each side, the difference between moderates and extremists is the intensity of their antipathy, not the object of their antipathy.
The subtitle of the work is Essays in Political Irrationality. Definitely recommended, buy it here. Fittingly, the dedication of the book is “To Alex Tabarrok, a captain of reason in a sea of political irrationality.”
Great News for Female Academics!
For decades female academics have been told that the deck is stacked against them by discrimination in hiring, funding, journal acceptances, recommendation letters and more. It’s dispiriting to be told that your career is not under your control and that, no matter what you do, you face an unfair, uphill battle. Why would any woman want to be a scientist when they are told things like this:
A vast literature….shows time after time, women in science are deemed to be inferior to men and are evaluated as less capable when performing similar or even identical work. This systemic devaluation of women women results in an array of real consequences: shorter, less praise-worth letters of recommendation, fewer research grants, awards and invitations to speak at conferences; and lower citation rates for their research…
The good news is that this depressing and dispiriting story isn’t true! In an extensive survey, meta-analysis, and new research, Ceci, Kahn and Williams show that the situation for women in academia is in many domains good to great. For example, in hiring for tenure the evidence is strong that women are advantaged. Moreover, women are advantaged especially in fields where they have relatively low representation (GEMP: geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science).
Among political scientists, Schröder et al. (2021) found that female political scientists had a 20% greater likelihood of obtaining a tenured position than comparably accomplished males in the same cohort after controlling for personal characteristics and accomplishments (publications, grants, children, etc.). Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments.
…In summary, all of the seven administrative reports reveal substantial evidence that women applicants were at least as successful as and usually more successful than male applicants were—particularly in GEMP fields.
…In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance. Specifically, women’s rank in male-dominated fields increased by up to 40% of a standard deviation. In contrast, male candidates in fields dominated by women (literature, foreign languages) were given a small boost over expectations based on blind ratings, but this difference was small and rarely significant.6
The situation is also very good in grant funding and journal acceptance rates which are either not biased or biased towards women. Similarly, “no persuasive evidence exists for the claim of antifemale bias in academic letters of recommendation.”
There is evidence of bias in student evaluations. Both female and male students rate male professors higher, even in situations where names are known but actual gender is blinded. Male students are more likely to write nasty comments. Most research universities, in my experience, don’t put much weight on student teaching evaluations, beyond do you pass a fairly low bar, but it can be disconcerting to get nasty comments.
There is also mild evidence of differences in salary, although less so when productivity is taken into account.
Some critics will say, but the real discrimination happens before a women applies for a tenure track job! Maybe so but that is a shifting of goal posts and we should take pride in the fact that in the United States today (and most developed countries) there is very little bias against women in high stakes, important decisions in tenure track hiring, journal acceptances, grant funding and so forth. This is a major accomplishment.
It should be noted that the Ceci, Kahn and Williams paper is an adversarial collaboration; Ceci and Williams have published previous work showing that women are, generally speaking, not discriminated against in academia while:
Kahn has a long history of revealing gender inequities in her field of economics, and her work runs counter to Ceci and Williams’s claims of gender fairness. Kahn was an early member of the American Economics Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). Articles of hers in the American Economics Review (Kahn, 1993) and in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Kahn, 1995) were the first publications on the status of women in the economics profession. She was the first to identify gender inequities as a concern in economics, something she has revisited every decade since then in her publications. In 2019, she co-organized a conference on women in economics, and her most recent analysis in 2021 found gender inequities persisting in tenure and promotion in economics (Ginther & Kahn, 2021). In short, gender bias in academia has been a long-standing passion of Kahn’s. Her findings diverge from Ceci and Williams’s, who have published a number of studies that have not found gender bias in the academy, such as their analyses of grants and tenure-track hiring in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS; Ceci & Williams, 2011; Williams & Ceci, 2015).
The Ceci, Kahn, and Williams paper covers much more material than I can cover here and is nuanced so read the whole thing but do also shout the good news from the rooftops!
My TLS essay on long-termism
I am pleased to have the lead cover essay in the new TLS, titled “Every Little Helps.” I consider three new books on long-termism, and give my latest thoughts on that movement. Here is one excerpt from a much longer piece:
I have found that many advocates of longtermism favour the analytic mode and consequently de-emphasize the empathetic mode of political argument. That is one reason why longtermism is so controversial. The complicated nature of long-term arguments means that they are most commonly put forward by people with analytical inclinations. The kinds of arguments and discourse that are corralled in support of longtermism emerge from fields such as economics, rational choice theory and ethics, game theory and analytic philosophy. That may be a bug or a feature, depending on your point of view. Either way, the true disagreements over long-termism, as with most political concerns, remain foundationally rooted in our emotions and our personal temperaments.
The right wing has its own version of scepticism about longtermism. To many of my conservative and libertarian friends it sounds like a programme for maximizing state power, or creating world government, for the pursuit of ill-defined, distant benefits that will likely never come to pass. In these people’s cynical but nonetheless insightful view, those who profess longtermism are, deep down, just as concerned with the immediate present and their short-term politics as is everyone else. The left and right-wing critiques may sound very different, but both point to a difficult question: are the most ardent longtermists even capable of longtermism themselves?
Recommended, for the short-term as well.
AGI and the division of powers within government
I’m not sure the AGI concept is entirely well-defined, but let’s put aside the more dramatic scenarios and assume that AI can perform at least some of the following functions:
1. Evaluate many policies and regulations better than human analysts can.
2. Sometimes outperform and outguess asset price markets.
3. Formulate the most effective campaign strategies for politicians.
4. Understand and manage geopolitics better than humans can.
5. Write better Supreme Court opinions and, for a given ethical point of view, produce a better ruling.
You could add to that list, but you get the point. These are a big stretch beyond current models, but not on the super-brain level.
One option, of course, is simply that everyone can use this service, like the current GPT-4, and then few questions arise about differential political access. But what if the service is expensive, and/or access is restricted for reasons of law, regulation, and national security? Exactly who or what in government allocates use of the service within government?
Can any member of the House of Representatives pay the service a visit and ask away? Do incumbents then end up with a major new advantage over challengers?
How do you stop the nuttier Reps from giving away the information they can access, perhaps to unsalubrious parties or foreign powers? Don’t national security issues suddenly become much tougher, as if all Reps suddenly are on the Senate Intelligence Committee?
Surely the President can claim it is a weapon of sorts and access it at will? Can he or she veto the access of other individuals? Will the rival running for President, from the other party, have any access at all?
Can the national security establishment veto the access of individuals within the political establishment? If so, does the Executive Branch and national security establishment gain greatly in power?
Have we now created a kind of “fourth branch” of government?
Do we ask the AI who or what should get access?
Say the Republicans or Democrats win a trifecta? Do they now have a kind of monopoly access over the AI?
Can the technically non-governmental Fed access it? If so, just the chair, the whole FOMC, or the staff as well? If the staff cannot access it, what good are they?
We haven’t even talked about federalism yet — what if a governor has a pressing query? Will Texas build its own model?
Let’s say this is the UK — does the party in opposition have equal access to the AI? Exactly which legal entity with which governance mechanism counts as “the party in opposition”? Can you start a small party, opposing the national government, just to get access?
Say some Brits are in a coalition with one of those tiny parties from Northern Ireland. Can the coalition partner demand access on equal terms? (How about Sinn Fein?) How about in PR systems?
Doesn’t this make all political coalitions higher stakes, more fraught, and more fragile? And more suffused with security risks?
Inquiring minds wish to know.
The link between economic concentration and political power?
Our findings do not support the political antitrust movement’s central hypothesis that there is an association between economic concentration and the concentration of lobbying power. We do not find a strong relationship between economic concentration and the concentration of lobbying expenditure at the industry level. Nor do we find a significant difference between top firms’ and other firms’ allocation of additional revenues to lobbying. And we find no evidence that increasing economic concentration has appreciably restricted the ability of smaller players to seek political influence through lobbying. Ultimately, our findings show that the political antitrust movement’s claims do not rest on a solid empirical foundation in the lobbying context. Our findings do not allay all concerns about transformation of economic power into political power, but they show that such transformation is not straightforward, and they counsel caution about reshaping antitrust law in the name of protecting democracy.
Here is the recent paper by Sepehr Shahshahani and Nolan McCarthy. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis. And yes, yes I know there is much more here than just lobbying expenditures, but that it doesn’t show up in that area…isn’t supportive.