Category Archives: American Politics

Growing ideological distance between the parties has produced clearer choices. This added clarity has resulted in improved propensity among voters to make ideologically consistent choices (Levendusky 2010). This is seen as a positive.

However, there may be some negative normative implications as well. If parties have moved away from the center, and if most people are near the center (as data shows), two things follow –
1) The average distance of each of those people from either of the parties has increased. So people’s choices have become impoverished.
2) The penalty of misclassification – for a leaner to mistakenly vote for the wrong party – has increased substantially. It may well be that while propensity of misclassification has decreased, the penalty has increased, leaving aggregate utility slightly worse off.

Secondly, if the government is at least partly in the business of providing public goods that require collective action (distributed costs), the split nature of constituencies and constituency-based entrenched positions may very likely lead to an under-provision of public goods.

Thirdly, and something that is covered in the first point, clearer choices don’t mean the choices that are the best, or even what people want. One would hope that the choices on offer are optimal but we know that monopolies or duopolies under conditions where start-up costs are high to get into the sector have a sparse record to providing something like that.

Fourthly, it also follows that given we have firm partisans, parties will stop broadening their constituencies beyond a certain point due to the law of really rapidly diminishing returns under sorted electorate conditions. This will mean that the policy buckets shrink, and they will have larger incentives to cater to their bases.

Fifthly, the legitimacy of the government is likely to be reduced among the losing camp which has reasons to believe that the ruling coalition doesn’t represent it.

It is sometimes assumed that high levels of institutional distrust in America are peculiar to it. So much so that a variety of theories have been offered to ‘explain’ this peculiarity including, but not limited to, elite polarization, income inequality, polarized media, etc. Empirical support for the ‘American exceptionalism’ however is somewhat less clear – across some major Western democracies (outside of the perennially ‘sunny’ Danes; one may talk about Scandinavian Exceptionalism perhaps), percent who ‘tend not to trust’ [pay attention to the y-axis] national government, national parliament, and political parties is alarmingly high. These high levels raise concerns about the legitimacy of the system.

The shooting of Representative Giffords has reignited the debate about the extent to which the public is polarized. Some political scientists have answered the question by evaluating data on people’s policy positions over the years. And the data are clear on the question—no, not really.

However, a lack of ‘real’ differences hasn’t always meant a lack of perceived differences. Nor has it meant lack of negative affect. Affective dislike, conditional on similarity, is unsurprising and typical, as the history of racial and ethnic hatred will attest to.

So, we tested to see whether partisans dislike each other. We asked a representative sample of Americans whether certain traits described Republicans and Democrats. From evaluations on 18 traits (selfish, generous, close-minded, honest, etc.), we created a latent measure of partisan affect (ICC here). Here’s a plot of latent partisan affect by partisan self-identification.

Only 6% of scientists in a random sample of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) identify themselves as Republicans, according to a Pew 2009 Study. Assuming AAAS is not tremendously unrepresentative of scientists as a whole, what explains under-representation of Republicans in science?

While Republicans are under-represented among people with advanced degrees more generally, I here limit myself to offering some possible hypotheses for explaining under-representation of Republicans in science, refraining from any attempt to analyze their validity.

Science education or practice causes liberalism:

1. Brainwashing: Science is taught by liberals, who brainwash their students into believing their preferred ideology.
2. Diversity: Upper echelon of science today is racially and culturally? diverse. Interacting with a diverse set of people causes people to become liberal.
3. Cynical: Science is funded by the government, and people in the field, like elsewhere, love the hand that feeds them.
4. People practicing science come to see the value of policy guided by science. On some major issues – like climate change and evolution, Republican Party has taken ‘anti-science’ stances.
5. Science causes people to question religious dogma, become atheists or even anti-theists, etc. causing them to choose a party less aligned with religion.

Confounders:

1. Intelligence: Intelligence causes liberalism (Kanazawa). Intelligence is one of the things that affect the choice of the discipline and the number of years a person chooses to study. Intelligence is the confounding variable that predicts both.

Liberals select into science, and Republicans select out of it.

1. Conservatives “have a need for cognitive closure” which is not amenable to open questions and scientific inquiry (Jost).
2. Concept of “conservatism” is one of maintaining the status quo.
3. Social dominance orientation: Republicans prefer going into status quo enhancing occupations like economics, business, police; Democrats less so (Sidanius).
4. Religious people don’t go into science, which they see as anti-religion.

While top colleges have been known to buck their admission criteria for the wrong reasons, they, on average, admit smarter students and the academic training they provide is above average. So it may be instructive to know what percentage of Senators, the most elite of the political brass, have graced the hallowed corridors of top academic institutions, and if the proportion attending top colleges varies by party.

While 5 of the 42 Republican senators have attended top colleges (in the top 20), 22 of the 57 Democratic senators have done the same (data are posted here). The skew in numbers may be because New England is home to both top schools and many Democratic senators. But the privilege accorded by the accident of geography is no less consequential than one afforded by some more equitable regime.

Discounting elite education, one may want to look at the extent of education. There one finds that whereas 73% of Democratic senators have an advanced degree, only 64% of Republican senators have the same. While again it is likely that going to top schools increases admission to good advanced degree programs, thereby making getting advanced degrees more attractive perhaps, one can conjecture that whatever the reason, some people, due to mere privilege perhaps, have better skills than others.

More:

“Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states.”

“Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi.”

“Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows.”

New York Times

Andrew Gelman’s take on the 2008 results–

“As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor,.. but the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories…”

Presidential debates occupy a unique place in the American political process. Debates trace their ancestry to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, which were actually between Senators, and focused mostly on the issue of slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were long, often boring, and if voting returns from Illinois counties, where debates were held, are anything to go by, Douglass won, by a rather significant margin. Douglass won the Senate race as well. (Senators were elected by state legislatures at that point in time and the decision of Lincoln and Douglas to publicly debate was controversial.)

The era of televised debates started with Senator Kennedy debating Vice-President Nixon in 1960. The debates came about at the suggestion of Adlai Stevenson whose influential column in The Week first proposed the idea. The debates made history, with footage of Nixon, wiping sweat from this brow, looking unshaven and snappish, firmly embedded in the presidential campaign folklore. But the televised debates of 1960 almost didn’t come off. In 1959, FCC received a complaint from the colorful perennial candidate Lar Daly who was running against the powerful mayor, Richard Daley. Lars complained that television was covering Richard Daley on issues unrelated to the campaign, if there’s such a thing, and argued for, as the law Section 315(a) of Communications Act of 1934 mandated equal time. FCC declined Lars’ request but asked Congress to take action. To address such issues, Congress created four exemptions to equal time law. It ruled that ‘Bonafide candidates’ may appear in Bonafide newscasts, Bona fide news interviews, Bona fide news documentaries, and on the spot coverage of bonafide news events. However, the exemptions made weren’t thought to allow for coverage of the presidential debate. Hence, to allow for the presidential debates, Congress suspended the equal time law for just 1960, and only for candidates running for president, allowing for the 1960 debates to happen.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s reluctance to debate Barry Goldwater meant that the Democrats in Congress shelved the bill to suspend equal time law for the year. 1968 and 1972 had Nixon running for president, and given his prior experience against Kennedy, it meant a summary no to presidential debates. But the history of televised presidential debates is as much a history of politics as telecommunication law intersecting with politics. So let me make a brief detour to talk a little more about Communication law- In 1971, an amendment to the Communications Act required stations make a reasonable amount of time available to federal candidates. Once time is made available under this provision, the equal time requirements of Section 315 did apply. The 1971 amendments also addressed the rates which stations can charge candidates for air time. Before 1971, Congress only required that the rates charged candidates be comparable to those offered to commercial advertisers. Now, Section 315 commands that as the election approaches, stations must offer candidates the rate it offers its most favored advertiser. Thus, if a station gives a discount to a commercial sponsor because it buys a great deal of airtime, the station must offer the same discount to any candidate regardless of how much time he or she purchases.

In 1976, debate coverage was allowed under the Aspen decision, which interpreted presidential debates as following under “on the spot coverage of bona fide news event” exception legislated by Congress in 1959— if the debates were organized someone other than the media, and broadcast live, and in their entirety. This was obviously highly disingenuous but repeated cases in Supreme Court failed to reverse the decision. With the decision in place, people scampered to find an organization willing to organize the debate. League of Women Voters finally accepted the responsibility and organized the 76 debate. The debates were held under their sponsorship till 84, and after 88 under Commission on Presidential Debates. The debates until of recently were the focus of extensive lobbying by the candidates and negotiation on the format (town hall/single moderator or panel of journalists/etc.), podium height, the temperature in the hall, whether candidates could use notes or not, among other things was intense and common. Only now, CPD has been able to leverage its power to limit the list of negotiable items. However, bigger problems remain. Constant questions about the utility of debates, and the rather arbitrary criteria for allowing for a third-party candidate to debate.

The military regularly ranks as the most trusted institution in America on public opinion surveys. Veterans are regularly deified by politicians of every stripe as heroes rendering extraordinary service to the country. Even when politicians are articulating their dissent over a war, they frequently take the time to praise the veterans and to reiterate America’s commitment to its veterans.

The unique status of the veterans and the military in modern American consciousness can perhaps be traced to the revolutionary origins of the United States. The military success in the “War of Independence,” and the “Second War of Independence,” and the heroism of the founders, is an essential part of America’s collective memory (and an essential part of the school history curricula). Tony Judt, writing for NYRB mentions that one of the reasons militarism continues to persist in the US is because,

“Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. [Judt makes a reference here to South’s defeat in the Civil War and subsequent reaction as the exception that proves the rule] Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly “good wars.” The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.”

Another possible reason for this continued ‘heroification’ of military and veterans is because as a country of immigrants, people do not have the shared history to rally around. In its absence, people have opted to rally behind things that exclude no one. That instinct has been buttressed by generations of strategic political actors and mass culture producers.

The other unique fact that brings the above arguments in sharp relief is the disproportionately (compared to other countries with volunteer armies) large number of veterans in the US. According to the Statistical Abstract of United States for 2004-2005, the country had 24.9 million veterans. The large veteran population is a result of two things: 1. having one of the largest standing armies in the world, and 2. the preponderance of personnel who serve the army only for a few years (many a time as a way to have their college tuitions paid.)

Given the factors outlined above, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the American presidency has been dominated by men with prior military experience. The sheer numbers, however, are still surprising. For 137 of the 219 years the country since its independence, the country has had a military veteran as a president. 29 of its 43 presidents have been veterans. And the longest time America has gone without electing a veteran is 32 year, starting with Taft in 1913 and ending with Roosevelt’s death in 1945. (Incredibly, during this time, the country took part in the two World Wars.)

There are three potential concerns about the numbers. Eight years of George W. Bush’s “service” in the National Guard have been excluded. Five years of Lincoln presidency have been included; Lincoln participated very briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832. And Millard Fillmore’s tenure isn’t included as his experience in the military was after he had left his presidency. One can question the inclusion of some other presidents, including Madison, whose service was brief again. But such tinkering is unlikely to impact the overall numbers much.

Note: Data on military experience of UK PMs and US Presidents.

The Oregon Supreme Court defines lobbying as “influencing, or attempting to influence, legislative action through oral or written communication with legislative officials, solicitation of others to influence or attempt to influence legislative action or attempting to obtain the goodwill of legislative officials.” [see David Fidanque and Janet Arenz, Petitioners on Review, vs. State of Oregon]

The proponents of lobbying argue that any law curtailing it impinges on two core First Amendment clauses: Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” or curtailing the “freedom of speech.” In return, the states have argued that they have substantial interests in preventing corruption, and the perception of corruption.

The courts have long upheld citizens’ rights to petition the government, noting that the idea of democratic government implies the citizen has the right to petition (Capps, 2005). The “right to petition” predates the Bill of Rights and thus is sacrosanct. Furthermore, the courts have also long upheld the idea that lobbying is a way of petitioning one’s representatives. In Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Pearson (390 F.2d 489, 491, 492 (D.C. Cir. 1967)) [For details on case citation], the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that people involved in trying to affect congressional action by engaging in lobbying activities were exercising their right to petition.

However, the courts have also long recognized that while the right to petition is an essential one, it is also a limited one (Capps, 2005). Hence, the courts have ruled that there is no absolute right of a citizen to speak in person with public officials. In absence of absolute rights, and citing countervailing interests like state’s interest in preventing corruption given the likelihood that lobbying will “promote the temptation to use improper means to gain success”, and maintaining confidence in the public decision-making process, the courts have sided with the government in a host of cases to restrict contingency fee arrangements, impose registration and disclosure requirements on lobbyists, prohibit lobbyists from making political contributions when legislature is in session (N.C. Right to Life, Inc. v. Bartlett, 168 F.3d 705, 717-18 (4th Cir. 1999)), among others. Courts, while ruling in these decisions, have noted that barring such practices do not substantively curtail the right to petition as they don’t impose a significant burden on the petitioning process, and should a law do so, it may be grounds for it being invalid. For example, in the Oregon Supreme Court decision cited above, the Court found that the biennial registration fee imposed by the state on the lobbyists to be more than the cost of registration, and hence invalid.

The underlying strain in these cases has been the need to balance the needs of the citizenry to openly petition its representatives and the needs of the executive and legislative branch to safeguard the system from corruption. While deciding on these cases, the courts have always been keenly cognizant that given there are three equal and separate branches of the government, they have limited rights in imposing the standards of operation within each branch of governance, as long as they do not violate the freedoms and rights guaranteed in the constitution. Simultaneously, the court has recognized in the past the merit of not only reducing the actual occurrence of corruption but also reducing the perception of corruption. In both Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), and McConnell v. FEC (540 U.S. 93 (2003) – brought after the enactment of McCain-Feingold or BCRA/Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) the Court has recognized the need to mitigate perceptions of corruption and actual incidence of corruption, and congressional authority to pursue legislation towards that purpose. The Court’s arguments, offered on maintaining the sanctity of the election process of legislators, should theoretically apply to the legislative process as well.

The “freedom of speech” arguments for lobbying stand on less firm grounds. The right to “freedom of speech” is not and should not be seen as a law guaranteeing the “right to be heard.” Similarly, there is no law protecting the right of a citizen to have a private hearing with the legislator or more broadly speaking, private speech.

The Courts have sided with the government in a significant number of cases where the state has shown a plausible case for restricting lobbying based on corruption concerns, and wherever they have found that the restrictions don’t disadvantage some content over others. However, there are legitimate, important rationales that undergird the right to lobby (petition) and courts have been cognizant not to support legislation that is overly broad. The law, however, doesn’t provide guidance on voluntary disavowal of money from lobbyists for campaigning (without the “magic words” that breach express advertising standard). Nor does it restrict lawmakers from running on a platform that upfront states that the said candidate will not accept ‘favors’ (legal ones) from lobbyists, or will not join a lobbying firm if his or her reelection bid fails (close the “revolving door”). Both the Congress and the Executive have significant leeway in enacting significant ethics reforms that will likely sharply curtail the power of “special interests,” and myriad options, including the one chosen by Edwards and Obama, remain open remain for lawmakers to not ‘choose’ to be influenced by ‘lobbyists.’ Combating the influence of special interest would, however, require more widespread measures, especially as public opinion polls become the key determinants of candidate policy positions and as lobbyists’ influence in manipulating opinion through media or ‘astroturfing’ increases. Fewer options exist to combat that except perhaps a more active citizenry.

Last thoughts: “Democratic Senator Max Baucus, the new chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is offering special interest [groups] a chance to go skiing and snowmobiling with him— $2,000-dollars a head, or $5,000-dollars from a political action committee.” reports ABC 7.

References

“Gouging the Government”: Why a Federal Contingency Fee Lobbying Prohibition is Consistent With First Amendment Freedoms.” 58 Vanderbilt Law Review 1885. Meredith A. Capps. (2005)

Marx Weber in 1946 gave a lecture on “Politics as Vocation” in which he described three preeminent qualities of a good politician—passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. It is the missing last one—the sense of proportion—that I declaim in this column.

NY Times carried an article today about the V-22 Osprey helicopter whose debut “on the battlefield end(ed) a remarkable 25-year struggle for the Marines to build a craft they could call their own.” The specificity of technology being built primarily for the military is mind-boggling. Equally mind-boggling is the amount the military is willing to spend. “The Pentagon has spent $20 billion so far and has budgeted $54.6 billion for it…Each V-22 costs about three times the price of a modern helicopter and nearly the same as a fighter jet. The Marines will get 360 Ospreys, Air Force Special Forces will get 50 and there will be 48 for the Navy.”

The gung-ho patriots may be OK with figures except the program is blighted by safety questions. “On April 8, 2000, 19 marines were killed in a training exercise when a V-22 descended too fast and crashed near Tucson. It was the third V-22 to crash — seven people were killed in two previous crashes…In December 2000, four more marines, including the program’s most experienced pilot, were killed in a crash caused by a burst hydraulic line and software problems.” The hilarious part is how Colonel Mulhern, the V-22 program manager, defends it: “The first marine it saves makes it worth what we paid for it. And I have real confidence that the V-22 will do it.” Yup, it won’t take 20 marines—one more than those killed in testing this white elephant—but just one marine to make it all worth it. And just for the record, a marine’s life is about $54.6 billion. (The “value of a statistical life” is about $7 million or just about 1/8k of a marine’s life. So we would be willing to sacrifice 8k Americans for 1 American Marine.)

Identity politics is a phrase that is traditionally reserved for politics of third-world nations with deep ethnic cleavages like India and Fiji. It is rarely used in the context of American politics, yet identity politics is rife in America.

More boldly, I would like to say that in fact, all politics is identity politics and the relative success of parties can be solely judged on how successful they have been in peddling robust identities. I use the word “robust” because it is important that identities be “essential” and fundamental to how one sees himself and hence immune to pressure (or logic) unless of course your identity is based on being data-driven. I make this claim because there is vast literature in political science that lays bare the abysmally low levels of information in the general population and it reasons hence that people must make decisions based on identity affiliation, an assertion that largely bears out in the data.

There are two caveats to the claim that I am making – one is that very few political identities are infinitely tensile – they eventually brook to contrary evidence. Identities can be resilient and make people delusional but often times they have limits. Secondly, political identity for many is a shifting idea determined by what is sexy (a reference to meaningless radical positions held by students) and by what is appropriate or comfortable or stokes one’s prejudices the right way (for example – people don’t ever explicitly call themselves racist. they just feel that all black people are lazy and deal in drugs. and that is true isn’t it – Bill O’Reilly certainly thinks so)

A measure of success would involve the percentage of partisan media one consumes. Identity politics involves a reshaping of the kind of media one consumes, the kind of messages one gets from it, and how s/he chooses to interpret them and “update” (in a Bayesian way) their thinking.

The law of stable yields

Identity politics is the only system that is capable of yielding stable yields and creating a strong unwavering kernel. It is no surprise hence the party in power in the US is the one that has had considerably more success in engaging in identity politics.