CAROLINE RIGHTON, the Conservative prospective MP for St Austell & Newquay, has welcomed the decision by Cornwall Council to remove the pissoirs in central Newquay and re- open public toilets. Speaking on the decision, Caroline said: “Thank goodness! I’ve always thought these pissoirs were disgusting and have always been against them. They hardly sent out the right message to the families and visitors the town wants to attract. “Their very absence might help discourage the sort of anti-social behaviour we have seen this summer. I’m glad the new regime at County Hall has made this decision and is going to re-open public lavatories. “I appreciate the costs of cleaning and repairing these facilities may increase but I feel this is surely a price worth paying in a civilised society.”

“It’s a disgrace and unworthy of a military officer. I don’t want to say another word about it.”

I feel the same way.

Dan Goldstein broadcast some advice on interviewing for academic jobs in marketing. My question was, how much are these pieces of advice are zero-sum and how much of them would create overall improvements.

Just for analogy, if I give people advice about how to make cleaner powerpoint presentations, that’s positive-sum (better communication for all); if I tell people a secret way to put their proposals at the top of the pile for a granting agency, that’s zero-sum; if I give people the advice of not posting preliminary results so they don’t get scooped, that’s negative-sum.

Now let me play this game with Dan’s advice:

“Get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA.”: Zero-sum, I think.

“Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized.”: Negative-sum. I’m not saying this wouldn’t work—a couple of years ago, our department missed out on a top candidate because we literally lost his file. But it can’t be good to have duplicate letters flying around.

“Don’t sweat it.”: Positive-sum.

“Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that here or she will not be your colleague in the future. Therefore, think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend.”: Positive-sum. Also a good point.

“Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.”: Positive-sum. It saves people time.

“Audition for the part, and make yourself stand out.”: Zero-sum. (Possibly negative-sum because of the time spent auditioning, possibly positive-sum because time spent auditioning could help with teaching.)

“One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you.”: Zero-sum. Or maybe positive-sum, I don’t know.

“Don’t gossip.”: Negative-sum. I say this because Dan illustrates with a story where the gossiper provided him with useful information! So the gossip was probably helpful.

Other thoughts on academic advice

All told, I think Dan’s advice is positive-sum. What made me think of all this is that sometimes I see advice for academic researchers that’s clearly negative-sum (or, at best, zero-sum), advice telling people not to do anything too original until they get tenure etc. (I got some of that advice from colleagues myself, back when I was an untenured professor.) Dan’s advice seems generally good to me (although, as noted above, I don’t think I can really judge that very well, it’s just my guess) but in general it seems worth thinking about whether advice that we’re giving is beneficial for outcomes or just positional.

We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science.

This is, of course, strongly reminiscent of the advice that Andrew’s sometime co-author, Gary King, gives to graduate students

Prepare this paper as if it were to be submitted for formal review at a professional journal. Go to the reading room in the library or JStor and have a look for examples. (Why? Quality may be everything, but it is hard to measure and so style provides important signals. For example, as a purely predictive matter, papers formatted with LATEX are much less likely to contain egregious methodological flaws. Use this to your advantage.)

The problem being, of course that if King’s advice becomes generally well known, it is likely to undermine itself. From personal experience, I can testify that it is a lot easier to learn LaTeX than serious quantitative techniques. Hence LaTeX may be an “important signal” but it is one that is relatively cheap and only weakly correlated with technical ability. Those of you who have to write game theoretic questions for comprehensive exams may possibly find it entertaining to turn King’s piece of advice into a signalling game and get students to figure out the separating and pooling equilibria under different sets of plausible parameters. It would surely get the point across to students in a more amusing way than all of those nuclear crisis scenarios from Schelling.

And while we are on the topic of sometime co-authors - is Andrew’s ‘claim’ to have written this with George A. Romero a bid to become the person who has the highest combination Erdos-Kevin Bacon number? Or are there people out there with higher (I don’t know what Andrew’s Erdos number is, but I am presuming it is decent-high)? It would be even better, of course, iif Romero somehow came across this paper and agreed to actually become a co-author …

Last year, OC Republican Rep. John Campbell offered a resolution congratulating UC Irvine’s men’s volleyball team for winning the national championships. Seems simple enough. Not quite. Bay Area Congressman George Miller asked House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland to stop Campbell’s measure from reaching the floor for a vote…

…So, naturally, Campbell did what any snubbed Anteaters-loving politician would do: He got even. On Tuesday, Hoyer proposed a resolution congratulating the University of Maryland’s Terps for making the NCAA tourney. Campbell opposed it and delayed the vote by asking for a roll call.

More is here.

[Via Insider Higher Ed.]

[A] president’s political acumen—his ability to put the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments—can mitigate the effects of rising unemployment. That’s what Ronald Reagan and the Republicans achieved in the 1982 midterm elections…

Using economic models, some political scientists predicted that Democrats would pick up as many as 50 House seats. The Democrats also hoped to win back the Senate, which they had lost in 1980. But when the votes were tallied, the Republicans lost 26 House seats and kept their 54 seats in the Senate.

And Brendan Nyhan plows this argument under. The problems are many. Judis picks one forecasting model but ignores others that got the seat loss almost correct. And, even troublesome for Judis’s thesis, Reagan’s approval actually declined during 1982 — precisely the time when he was “putting the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments.”

The lesson has nothing to do with Reagan per se. It’s simply that presidents are far less powerful as communicators than Judis and others seem to believe.

The animations work best if you enlarge the screen. Btw, Adam’s site is a great example of how to use ones blog to publicize ones research.

are four countries where Russia feels it must fully reconsolidate its influence: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Georgia. These countries protect Russia from Asia and Europe and give Moscow access to the Black and Caspian seas. They are also the key points integrated with Russia’s industrial and agricultural heartland. Without all four of them, Russia is essentially impotent. So far, Russia has reconsolidated power in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and part of Georgia is militarily occupied. In 2010, Russia will focus on strengthening its grasp on these countries.

Dmitry’s response:

This analysis is so wrong as to be funny. To say that Russia has reconsolidated its influence in those three countries is to be completely ignorant of current events. Belarus has recently turned away from Russia and is trying to get closer to the EU. Kazakhstan is primarily focused on developing its economy and is turning more and more to China in the economic and even inthe security sphere. And anyone who thinks that Yanukovich will do whatever Russia wants will be sorely disappointed. All signs in Ukraine point to him driving a hard bargain and making Russia pay for what it wants — it won’t be the knee-jerk anti-Russianism of Yushchenko, but he won’t meekly submit either.

I actually very much agree with Dmitry in term of his take on Yanukovich (although see the interesting discussion in the comments section of his post as to whether ijt will be Yanukovich or his advisers calling the shots) and Ukraine, but this does raise a larger point worth discussing. By definition, these “intelligence companies” produce proprietary information that is usually sold at a very high price and, consequently, out of the view of academics and other country experts not associated with corporation that can pay for these sorts of reports. Indeed, the Expanding Russian Influence series is only available to subscribers, and Dmitry was only able to quote from it because it is being reprinted in Johnson’s Russia List.

Now of course these reports are written in many cases by academics or other country experts hired as consultants. I’m not sure how Stratfor produces these reports, but I’m guessing that this is decidedly not a peer review process. And once the reports are written, they are often out of view of the people who study these countries for a living.

I want to set aside the question of whether companies like Stratfor have the right to sell proprietary analysis - of course they do. But much like my earlier criticism of polling companies that don’t release cross-tabs, I think serious questions need to be asked about the quality of these reports. Do they merely reflect one person’s opinion? Would they be more insightful is they were subjected to a wider degree of scrutiny? Perhaps Stratfor could provide a better product of they released their reports to a subset of country experts (like Dmitry) and allowed them to add commentary and assessment of the analysis. Maybe this would even produce a product more valuable to their clients.

Moreover, if Dmitry is correct and the content of this series is laughable, ought we as academics to be concerned about this? As someone who studies Russia for a living, should I be concerned that commercial organizations are releasing poor analyses of Russian foreign policy that will be read by people paying big bucks to see these analyses? I’m not really sure - perhaps it is just none of my business. But if so, is there anything we can do about it? In a sense, this is exactly what led me to write this post: I wanted to give a broader airing to Dmitry’s critique of the series. Whether there is much overlap between people who read Stratfor’s reports and The Monkey Cage, I suppose, is another matter.

Click here to read Dmitry’s full post, which is well worth reading.

So bemoaned then Minority Leader Bob Michel in this Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post in 1987. Well, the ballgame’s gone outside. Just when you thought reporters had tired of refereeing reconciliation, the Byrd Rule, and filibusters, everyone’s trekked over to the House ballfield for a game with self-executing rules. (Like CalvinBall, but different.)

I can’t do justice to the entire body of legislative scholarship on House restrictive rules in a short blog post, but the place to start would be Stan Bach and Steve Smith’s classic work, Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives, which can be found here. Others, including Barbara Sinclair, and Keith Krehbiel, offer competing perspectives on House majority party use of restrictive rules.

Here, I want to offer a brief perspective on the use of self-executing rules, given the many claims made in recent days about these rules, as House Democrats have debated how to structure the upcoming votes on the Senate-passed health care bill and the reconciliation “fix.”

These special procedures provide that the House— upon adoption of the special rule— is considered or “deemed” to have taken some other action as well. In the case of health care reform, the idea is that the special rule for considering the reconciliation bill would include a “deeming” provision. One form of this deeming provision could provide that when the House votes to approve the special rule for the reconciliation bill (or, alternatively, when the House votes to pass the reconciliation bill), the House is simultaneously considered to have voted for and passed the Senate-passed health care overhaul. In short, the vote on the temporary rule also provides for passage of the Senate-passed health care bill. Contrary to all the handwringing from the left (Jack Balkin’s blog) to the right (okay, far right, editorial page of the Wall Street Journal), there’s nothing unconstitutional about the maneuver.

2. Why do majority parties use self-executing rules?

Self-executing rules are simply one form of temporary “restrictive” rules that House majorities use to structure consideration of major bills on the House floor. Restrictive rules are attractive to majority leaders as they allow them (assuming a chamber majority concurs) to structure vote choices on the chamber floor in a manner intended to protect the majority party’s favored policy outcomes from challenge. For example, restrictive rules often limit or exclude amendments on the floor if the majority party does not want to risk altering the bill or wishes to avoid asking its members to cast a tough vote. (But note, restrictive rules are not exclusively used by majority parties to attempt to move policy choices off-center; closed rules for Ways and Means tax bills can protect bipartisan compromises, for example.) As the parties have become more polarized and especially in periods of tight party margins, both Democratic and Republican majorities have turned increasingly to restrictive rules and in an increasingly creative (or, from the minority’s perspective, abusive) way. Here, I show the percentage of special rules adopted each Congress that included restrictive procedures. The trend is stark:

3. Are self-executing rules unprecedented?

Self-executing rules certainly have precedent in the House’s repertoire of restrictive rules. My morning count of self-executing rules from back issues of the House Rules Committee’s Survey of Activities produces the following count (shown as the percentage of restrictive rules each Congress that included self-executing provisions):

4. Have self-executing rules been used on major bills before?

Just like the debates over reconciliation, most observers have claimed that self-executing rules have never been used for such a major bill. Even NPR this morning intoned that self-executing rules were common, but “not on anything as big as health overhaul.” It is certainly true that self-executing rules are more often used for less controversial measures— quite often to have the House adopt Senate amendments to a House-passed bill— simply in the name of efficiency. Still, perhaps the most salient use of self-executing rules— reaching back to 1979— allows the House to avoid casting a direct vote on raising the federal debt limit. The rule for adopting the concurrent resolution on the budget typically deems as passed a measure to increase the debt ceiling. It’s hard to argue that there’s any measure more central to the functioning of the nation than its ability to issue debt. (See Don Wolfensberger’s nice history of this practice— formerly known as the Gephardt Rule, the Hastert Rule, and now apparently the Slaughter House Rule.)

5. C’mon. Aren’t Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats crazy?!

As Bob Michel would remind us, most legislative games aren’t watched this closely. And, I would hazard, most close observers doubt that it will make a difference to voters whether Democrats explicitly voted for the Senate-passed bill or voted for a procedure that allowed it to be passed. But legislators sure think that it matters. They seem to think that it offers a method of avoiding blame should they be attacked come election time for their votes.

And, lest we forget, the machinations over the rule originated in House Democrats’ concern that the Senate would fail to pass the reconciliation fix, leaving Democrats on the hook for having enacted the Senate-passed bill (when they preferred a “fixed” version). A “well-crafted” self-executing rule— one that sent both the overhaul bill and the reconciliation bill to the president at once— would have allowed Democrats to bridge that increasingly wide gap of distrust between House and Senate. Alas, Congress and health care is not a game of inside baseball, and everyone is watching.

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This graph appeared last month in a Gallup report. As a political scientist, I was less interested in the overall support levels (which apparently have already shifted a bit in favor of passing reforms since these polls were taken), but rather in the difference between the two graphs.* According to Gallup, respondents were first asked if they favored passing the health care bill, and then asked if they favored passing it using reconcilliation. The “process” in this case apparently cost about 3% points of support. So it is not irrelevant, but hardly a game changer in terms of public opinion.

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*Slightly more wonkish technical discussion: It should be noted that Gallup did not use a true experimental design here, with half of the respondents being randomly assigned to receive one version of the question and the other half the other. So it is possible that a desire to remain consistent might bias respondents towards giving the same answer to both questions. On the other hand, it may also be possible that the fact that the question about reconciliation was asked second may have been cuing respondents that there was something “different” about reconciliation, and, given the media’s fascination with the issue, that perhaps this was supposed to change their opinion. Personally, I find in interesting that the number of “don’t knows” didn’t change. This suggests that reconciliation is not really having any affect on people who don’t already have an opinion on health care, although of course it is possible that reconciliation pushed some supporters into don’t knows and don’t knows into opposing, although my gut instinct is that this is not likely to be the case. For those interested in Don’t Know responses, see Adam Berinsky’s Silent Voices.