The Monkey Cage

Rice, in Sweden for a conference on Iraq, ended up in the Sheraton hotel where the band Kiss was staying the night before a concert. Negotiations between State Department aides and Kiss’s manager resulted in a rendezvous between the two.

During the gathering, Kiss leaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley tried to recruit Rice, a talented classical pianist, to join the band.

“I don’t rock,” she told them.

“I’m sure you can rock,” Simmons replied.

[From the Washingtonian magazine. See also here, which has a picture. I could have used it, but who wants to see Kiss without their make-up on?]

[P.S. Detroit Rock City.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photo is the document most requested from the National Archives, topping requests for copies of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And rightly so, of course.

Following up on my earlier post that featured this photo, reader John Shelton Lawrence has kindly forwarded this link to the correspondence between The King and All the President’s Men, from both before the historic December 21, 1970 meeting and after Elvis had left the building. Included are Elvis’s handwritten note requesting a get-together, several internal White House memos, and numerous photos memorializing the occasion..

Teaser: In a memo to the guardian of Nixon’s door, H.R. Haldeman, recommending that Presley’s request for a meeting be granted, White House aide Dwight Chapin writes:

…if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside the government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.

Haldeman’s scrawled response:

You must be kidding.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh’s hilarious first-hand account of the meeting. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

And now you know … the rest of the story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Safire may or may not be your cup of tea as a political pundit, but his writings on the political uses of language are both enlightening and entertaining. Thus I’m pleased to note the release of an updated and expanded version of his The Language of Politics, which was originally published in 1968 and was most recently revised in 1993; the new version has been retitled Safire’s Political Dictionary. While you’re visiting your neighborhood bookstore or amazon.com to pick up several copies of Buell and Sigelman’s masterful Attack Politics, be sure to grab a copy of Safire’s new edition as well. It’s not a book you’ll want to read from cover-to-cover, but it’s a great reference work and an excellent way to while away an hour or two on a rainy afternoon.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A daughter with her senatorial father: Meghan and John McCain

In research published in the March 2008 issue of the American Economic Review, Ebonya Washington begins by noting that “Psychologists have demonstrated a link between offspring gender and parental beliefs on … issues of political significance.” Prior studies have established, for example, that parents of daughters are more likely to support pay equity, comparable worth, affirmative action in regards to gender in employment, and Title IX policies. (Click here for the abstract of a pertinent study.)

Might this relationship carry over the highest stratum of political decision makers?

Washington finds that it does. Based on her analysis of roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate, she concludes as follows:

While the notion that a legislator’s children influence his congressional voting behavior appears commonsensical, there has, to this point and to my knowledge, been no evidence to quantitatively substantiate this intuition. This paper begins to fill this hole in the literature. I find that conditional on number of children, parenting an additional female child increases a representative’s propensity to vote liberally on women’s issues, particularly reproductive rights. Such a voting pattern does not seem to be explained away by constituency preferences,
suggesting not only does parenting daughters affect preferences, but also that personal preferences affect legislative behavior.

Consequently these results [suggest that] to the realm of environmental effects, such as peers and neighborhoods, … we should add offspring effects.Not only should we consider the impact that parents have on children’s attitudes and behavior, but we should consider that there may be reverse causality in the parental/child attitude relationship.

A second contribution of this work is to the literature on congressional voting. This paper not only provides a robustness check on the finding that ideology impacts legislative voting, it also serves to identify an additional component of that ideology: child gender composition.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

George W. Bush has two, but Saddam Hussein had six. Bill Clinton has one, but Kim il-Sung (shown above with the infant Kim Jong-il) had seven. Ronald Reagan had three, but the Sultan of Brunei has 10. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had two apiece, but Idi Amin had somewhere between 30 and 45.

Do you see any pattern here?

I’m speaking, of course, of children.

On the assumption that what matters most to political leaders is survival, Dustin Beckett and Gregory D. Hess argue, in essence, that leaders are motivated to immortalize themselves or at least to secure the future of their regime (abstract here). This motivation, in turn, leads them to try to influence the selection of their successor. From the leader’s perspective, trust in one’s presumed successor is vital, or else a successor might pull a Khrushchev by disassociating himself from the legacy of the leader. (I’m aware that Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin’s immediate successor, but you get the point.)

How, then, to ensure that one can trust one’s likely successor to carry on as one would wish? Because blood is thicker than water, the safest route is to keep it all in the family. For the leader of a non-democratic system, then, the best way to assure a “trustworthy succession match” is to sire a whole lot of children, in hopes that by the luck of the genetic draw one of them will turn out to be a “person who can successfully maintain the regime and the expropriation of rents, and with whom the enforcement of ex-ante promises is less problematic.” (As you can tell from the way they talk, Beckett and Hess are economists.)

By contrast, leaders in democratic systems find themselves more hemmed in by those bothersome checks and balances, and so many other people have a say in the choice of their successor that democratic leaders can’t do all that much to determine who is next in the line of succession anyway.

From these considerations, Beckett and Hess extract the expectation that the leaders of non-democratic systems will sire more children than their democratic counterparts, in hopes of finding the trustworthy succession match that they so avidly seek.

Sounds pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Well, Beckett and Hess’ empirics, based on the composition of the families of 221 leaders worldwide and a wide array of country- and leader-level data, indicate that the leaders of non-democracies do indeed produce more offspring than the leaders of democracies; Idi Amin may have been an outlier, but his autocratic peers also tend to be prolific begetters. On average, the leaders of fully non-democratic countries have sired between 1.5 and 2.5 more children than the leaders of fully democratic countries — and this relationship holds up when a wide array of statistical controls are instituted. (So it’s not just that, say, the leaders of Muslim countries, most of which are non-democratic, have lots of wives and sire lots of children. There’s more to it than that.)

To which I must caution that the empirical relationship that Beckett and Hess observe is a matter of differences of degree, on average, rather than a universal generalization. Exceptions come fairly quickly to mind. Stalin, for example, had only three children (which could, if one buys Beckett and Hess’ argument, help explain the destalinization that occurred soon after his death). And some democratic leaders do produce a large number of children. John Adams, for example, had five, Willliam Henry Harrison had nine, and George H.W. Bush had six. But perhaps these are just exceptions that prove Beckett and Hess’ rule: When it comes to succession (whether immediate, as in the Adams and Bush cases, or delayed, as with the Harrisons), the more children, the better.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted by Sarah Binder at 03:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Governing Magazine and the Pew Center on the States have just issued “efficiency and effectivenes” ratings of the 50 state governments. And the winners are … Utah, Virginia, and Washington, each with an overall grade of A-.

The ratings assess each state government in four key areas.

(1) Money: How states manage fiscal resources, including budgeting, forecasting, accounting and financial reporting, procurement, contracting, investments, and debt.

(2) People: What states are doing to recruit and retain strong professionals and to offer development and recognition for top-level service.

(3) Infrastructure: How states maintain, improve, and plan for future physical infrastructure needs, including roads, bridges and buildings.

(4) Information: How effectively states apply data and technology to measure the effectiveness of services, make decisions, and communicate with the public.

The state governments were graded — in dog-show fashion — against a set of criteria rather than directly against one another. Feeding into these assessments were data from “over 12,000 different sources—including surveys, written documents and interviews.”

Some of the state ratings should cause raised eyebrows — at least they raised mine. For example, Louisiana gets an overall grade of B and Kentucky a B-. These above-average and average grades, respectively, certainly cut against the grain of popular conceptions of the way those two states are run, and lead me to suspect that grade inflation isn’t confined to academia.

Anyway, how did your state do? To find out, click here. Does that seem about right to you? Do the raters know something you don’t know?

(By the way, the building pictured above is the State Capitol of South Dakota, in Pierre (pronounced “Peer,” of course, not “Pee-air”).

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language […] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.

As expressed by Benjamin Whorf, that’s the essence of what has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf or “linguistic relativity” hypothesis. It’s what came to my mind recently when I read an ingenious new study by Thomas Hammond, Kyle Jen, and Ko Maeda in the latest issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics (abstract here).

The basic idea underlying the study is that how an organization structures the information that it possesses is likely to affect what decision makers learn from this information. Lacking an ability to create experimental organizations that structure information in different ways, the researchers turned to the library catalogue — which, after all, is a hierarchical organizer of knowledge — as a testing site. The research question boiled down to whether users in a university library that uses the Library of Congress cataloguing system could be led by these two different information structures to behave differently than those in a Dewey Decimal-based university library. (The Northwestern and Michigan State libraries, where they conducted the study, contain virtually the same number of books overall — approximately 4,000,000 apiece.)

Continue reading "How the Way We Organize Information Can Shape Our Behavior -- A New Application of an Old Idea" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s a great anecdote about discrimination on the basis of gender, followed by an even better punchline about Congress, from a brief “First Person Singular” interview with former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder in last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine. Reminiscing about her first few days as a student in the Harvard Law School in the the early 1960s, Schroeder says:

I think it was not until I got to Harvard Law School where it suddenly hit me that not everybody was quite as open and supportive of women as my father. …[T]here were only 15 women in the class.

…All of a sudden, you had people saying things like ‘Do you realize you have taken this position from a man?’ And even the dean of Harvard Law School said the same thing, and he was then [a member of] the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He had all the women over to his house the first week, and he put us in a circle and said, ‘I want to know why you came here.’ His spin was: We let you in equally, but I don’t think any of you are going to use this [law degree]. So, we count how many of you there are, and we let in that many more men.

I don’t know what they thought — that we were going to hang the degree over the changing table or something? … Here was this very bright man who understood racism, but did not understand at all that he was being very sexist saying such a thing. Well, he went around and asked each of us why we came [to Harvard]. Of course, everyone is shaking in their chair because this is the dean — except for this wonderful young woman from California. She looks him straight in the eye and says, ‘Well, I am only here because I could not get in at Yale.’ He went ballistic.

Harvard really prepared me for Congress.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lee Sigelman assured me when I took on this assignment that once one started blogging, everything would suddenly take on the character of a potential subject for a post. He was, as always, right; I have been ruminating about the masthead of this blog for several days. Mencken is one of my heroes, if only because he provides so many wonderful observations for use in undergraduate lectures or as epigraphs for articles (and blogs). I love his combination of cynicism and resonance with the aspirations of ordinary people. He is also laugh-out-loud funny.

But Mencken was anti-Semitic, viciously and consistently, even after World War II. I will spare us all any quotations, but Thomas Mallon is right to point out that “Mencken’s anti-Semitism, by any definition, and in any time or place, was spectacular—gaudy, energetic, and marked by, to use a Mencken term, salacity’.” (Click here to read his essay.). Should I stop reading, quoting, or teaching Mencken; should “The Monkey Cage” be christened with a new name? I don’t think so, but I have a hard time explaining why not.

Consider another example, also a hero whom I read, teach, and quote from a great deal: Benjamin Franklin. He was, by almost any account, a deep humanist and at the end of his life he took on the mission of seeking to abolish slavery. But he also wrote in his Autobiography about American Indians, “If it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.”

How should we evaluate, teach, and write about people like Mencken and Franklin? Some of my students are prepared simply to condemn them as racists and therefore dismiss everything they wrote, or at least to interpret all of their writings through the lens of racism. But this seems to me too stringent, if only because I don’t want my own corpus of work to be interpreted through the stupidest sentences I ever write. Others are willing to excuse people like Mencken or Franklin on the grounds that they merely reflect the common discourse of their time. That seems too lenient, if only because by definition our heroes are not participants in common discourse; if they were, they would not have been identified as heroes. So they should be evaluated differently.

I continue to look for some middle interpretive ground that neither dismisses important political actors with a glaring flaw nor dismisses the flaw because the political actors are otherwise important. Exactly how to do that, however, remains a puzzle.

Posted by Jennifer Hochschild at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I do not always read the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times Sunday Styles section because it’s often really depressing. But today’s column was a gem. The gist of the story is that a hardcore Democrat, Ann Hood, fell for and married a Republican man. It is a love story, but more importantly, a synopsis of political science findings:

The power of party identification. This is the thrust of the whole piece. Although the number of political independents has been increasing, most of those are independents who lean towards one party, and they are almost as partisan as those who identify immediately as Democrats or Republicans (thus, the “myth of the independent voter”). Moreover, as Larry Bartels has shown, the influence of party identification on how we vote is also increasing. Partisan identities are meaningful, and thus it is no surprise that Hood’s heart sinks even as it swells with ardor:

Still, it did not feel good when I told myself: I love a Republican.

And is no surprise that even though her new love feigns independence — “I vote for the best candidate” — he really means this: “They just happen to be mostly Republicans.”

Partisan identities are social identities. This is the argument of Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler in this book. They contend that we think about partisanship in terms of the kinds of people who are Democrats and Republicans. Political parties thus become teams, and Hood feels like she’s letting down the team:

It [loving a Republican] felt, in fact, like I had betrayed someone. Or many people.

Political homophily, a.k.a. birds of a feather flock together. Diana Mutz has shown that people’s personal networks — those with whom they discuss politics — are remarkably homogeneous. People discuss politics mostly with those who already share their opinions. And so it is for Hood and her new beau:

Everyone I knew only read about and listened to and voted for Democrats…

…Whenever we were with my friends, I would silently tally who was on which side. Inevitably it was my friends, blue; my husband, red. The opposite was also true. Almost without exception, his friends voted red, and I was a minority of one.

Party identification is a powerful but not all-powerful influence. This was an important caveat among the original theorists of party identification (in the classic The American Voter). People do deviate, although not often, from their traditional partisan preference. And thank goodness for that, because it saves this edition of Modern Love from heartache. It turns out that in the 2008 election, Hood’s husband supports this guy.

Posted by John Sides at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The very first thing I ever noticed about Barack Obama was that he’s left-handed. I pride myself in my ability to pick left-handers out of a crowd. For us left-handers, laterality is more salient than it is to those who do things the other way around.

Anyway, in case you were in doubt, here’s proof of Obama’s left-leaning tendencies. (For those to whom such things matter, he’s a White Sox fan.)

But that raises a question — or at least it did for my niece Kim, who, knowing of her uncle’s fixation on matters having to do with handedness (and, I suspect, grasping for hopeful signs about Obama’s presidential candidacy), asked me whether any of our recent presidents have been left-handers. I immediately responded that in this respect at least, Obama should not be viewed as the candidate of “change,” for several recent presidents — indeed, most of them — have shared Obama’s leftward leanings. Here, then, is a little gallery of recent presidential portsiders.

Continue reading "The Left Side of the Political Spectrum" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Matt Yglesias is bemused by a John O’Sullivan post saying that it would be rational for conservatives not to support McCain when he wins the nomination.

O’Sullivan:

Many conservatives believe that the key question in this election is: Are there to be two multiculturalist open-borders parties or one? If McCain’s election were to make the GOP fundamentally similar to the Democrats on immigration, bilingualism, racial preferences, and all the National Question issues, that would be a resounding historical defeat for conservatives. … The willingness of a President McCain to cooperate with the Democrats would give such issues as an immigration amnesty a better chance of passage than under a President Hillary or Obama even against strong GOP resistance in Congress. Opponents of such policies, despite enjoying majority support among the voters, would find themselves politically marginalized.

Yglesias:

I think it’s probably true that, in practice, a comprehensive immigration reform is more likely to come in a McCain administration than it would in an Obama or a Clinton administration. So in a narrow sense, O’Sullivan’s making sense. … But this analysis seems to entirely lack context. If electing a pro-amnesty Republican whose administration fails to ban affirmative action programs would be the end of the conservative movement, then Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office were, just like George W. Bush’s, a “resounding historical defeat for conservatives.” Conservatives can be purists if they like, but the reality is that these are issues on which people who agree with O’Sullivan have never held the whip-hand, and it’s unlikely that they ever really will as long as the GOP remains the party of business first and foremost.

Continue reading "Rational irrationality" »

Posted by Henry at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The current administration has come in for a great deal of criticism about its assertions of state secrets privilege to block requests for disclosure of classified information. In a recent article in the George Washington Law Review, Robert Chesney runs some numbers that put these criticisms in a rather different light. (By the way, if you’re unaccustomed to reading law review articles, settle in for a long night.) Chesney shows that since the seminal Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Reynolds in 1953), there has been a sharp rise in invocations of the privilege, but most of that upward trend occurred during the 1980s, not since 2001. From 2001 through 2006, the Bush administration invoked the privilege a total of 20 times — an average of about 3.3 times per year. By comparison, between 1991 and 2000, Bush’s immediate predecessors, the senior Bush and the putatively first Clinton, tallied an average of 2.6 such assertions per year, up from Reagan and Bush’s average of 2.3 per year between 1981 and 1990. Thus, an upward trend in recent years, but in Chesney’s judgment (and, for that matter, according to by conventional statistical criteria) not a significant one.

Cheney also emphasizes that the increase since 2001 reflects the fact that the nation has been at war for virtually all of that period, in contrast to the great majority of the previous two decades.

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (quoted in the Washington Post article where I spotted Cheney’s figures — an article whose headline doesn’t accurately reflect its contents) contend that irrespective of how often the Bush Administration has asserted the privilege, it has abused it. Others, like the former asssociate attorney general who is also quoted in the Post story, disagree with that assessment, arguing that “The privilege exists to protect national security information, and they’re using it to do that.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Margaret Truman died today.

For those of you who are too young to know of Margaret Truman as anything other than the writer of a long list of mediocre mysteries set in Washington DC, here’s an obit that provides a lot of interesting background information. As arguably the first White House offspring beset by an overabundance of media coverage, she came in for considerable criticism for reasons that by today’s standards would be considered totally inconsequential (e.g., wearing a scarf rather than a hat in public, and subsequently for donning a chapeau rather than showing off her hairdo), and thus blazed a trail later reluctantly followed by Amy Carter, Chelsea Clinton, and the Bush twins, among others.

[Hat tip to Jim Lebovic]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

An interesting New York Times article about politics among our furry, feathered, and finny friends.

[Hat tip to Darren Schreiber]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No, I’m not talking about football. (Well, Louisiana is #1 on the gridiron, too, its Bayou Bengals having humiliated TOSUFF in the national championship game). This is about a great American participant sport, not our favorite spectator sport.

I’m speaking, of course, of corruption in public office.

The new ratings are out, and once again the Pelican State has done itself proud, as have several of its Dixie neighbors. Here are ratings for the 26 most populous states, and here, in case you want to examine the data in their unadorned splendor, is the original source material.

There may be some good stuff here for specialists in comparative state politics, especially those who, in the Elazar tradition, have an interest in the impress of political culture.

[Hat tip to our GW English Department colleague Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries blog]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Has Nicolas Sarkozy’s approval rating taken a dive because of his recent romance with “model-turned-singer” Carla Bruni? So says this New York Times piece, basing this conclusion on a January CSA poll:

According to a nationwide survey by the polling group CSA published Sunday, only 48 percent of the French surveyed said they trusted the president to run the country — a fall of seven points in a month. Since last July, his approval rating has plunged by 17 percentage points.

“President Sarkozy is exposing his flamboyant personal life at the moment the French want him to deliver on his promises to improve the economy,” said Stéphane Rozès, CSA’s director, in a telephone interview on Monday. “He has eliminated the line between public and private life, between his success in his personal life and his promises for the French people to succeed.”

Does the evidence support this conclusion? No. Here is a graph of favorability toward Sarkozy, drawing on data from 3 different polling agencies. (Each of them asks a slightly different question, but with little evident consequence.) The January datapoint is from the Times piece. I have put a vertical line at the point where the Sarkozy-Bruni relationship was first reported (Dec. 18, according to a Lexis search for “Sarkozy Bruni”).

The solid line displays the CSA finding. Clearly there has been a decrease from 55% in December to 48% in January. If we assume that about 1,000 people were interviewed, then the margin of error is about 3 points, which does make this 7-point drop slightly outside the margin of error (which must be added/subtracted to both 55% and 48% to tell whether the difference is significant).

However, it is clear that Sarkozy’s ratings have been dropping steadily throughout the fall. Moreover, CSA’s 48% figure is not significantly different from his rating in a December Ifop poll (51%) or his rating in a November TNS poll (49%), both of which occurred before this apparent romance. Thus, the conclusion of Rozès seems premature.

So, in sum, my message to you, President Sarkozy, is this: vive l’amour!

[Update: Despite my attempts to email the NY Times reporter, Elaine Sciolino, this post, the next day she was still referring to the “steep decline” in Sarkozy’s approval rating.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Among Russians, Putin’s crackdown on democratic freedoms is far outweighed by the gains that have been registered in stability and economic growth, and as a consequence “the new tsar” is extradorinarily popular.

However, attributing responsibility to public officials for what happens during their watch is a tricky business (and is thus the subject of a substantial research literature). In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss argue that in lionizing Putin the Russian public has got it all wrong. The idea that Putin “has forged a model of successful market authoritarianism

…is based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin’s autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: to the extent that Putin’s centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.

Click here for the full article.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a follow-up to my previous post on the controversy engendered by the promiscuous use of commas in the Second Amendment, here is a brief recent commentary by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.

[Hat tip to Eric Saidel.]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When most Americans discuss politics, their conversations are with those who share their own political perspectives. How, then, do they hear the “other side of the story,” and what happens when they do? Television is one of the primary conduits through which they are exposed to contrary views — and a study by Diana Mutz in the November 2007 issue of the American Political Science Review “suggests that television does, indeed, have the capacity to encourage greater awareness of oppositional perspectives.”

That isn’t necessarily good news, though, for under certain circumstances familiarity appears more likely to breed contempt than empathy. The uncivil, “in-your-face” character of much televised political discourse can, Mutz finds, “cause audiences to view oppositional perspectives as less legitimate than they would have otherwise.” People do learn from such exchanges, but “The ‘in-your-face’ intimacy of uncivil political discourse on television discourages the kind of mutual respect that might sustain perspections of a legitimate opposition. …Seeing politicians argue about their disagreeable policies up-close and personal rather than from a distance intensifies citizens’ negativity toward those people and ideas that they dislike.”

Click here for the full text of this article.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chapter 1

From Peter Baker in this morning’s Washington Post:

Still looking for that last-minute Christmas gift for White House Press secretary Dana Perino? May we recommend a gift certificate for the forthcoming book on the Cuban Missile Crisis by our colleague Michael Dobbs, “One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War,” due out next summer?

Appearing on National Public Radio’s light-hearted quiz show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell me,” which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — and she didn’t know what it was.

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about … the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’”

Chapter 2

From the deep recesses of my own memory:

In 1993, I was contacted by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who was then president of this fair university. He said that he had recently dined with a prominent U.S. Senator who had agreed to give a speech about the U.S. presidency. This senator (who will remain unnamed here) told Trachtenberg that he was a bit nervous about giving this speech because he wasn’t an expert on the presidency. Never fear, Trachtenberg replied, we’ve got this hot new guy in our political science department. I’ll send him over and he can brief you. And so Trachtenberg called me.

I immediately enlisted the involvement of a colleague who was teaching our presidency course, and at the appointed hour we trooped over to the Cosmos Club for our date with destiny.

The senator was obviously preoccupied with what apparently would be his major decision of the day — the selection of an appropriate bottle of wine. With that preliminary finally completed after only half an hour or so, he turned to the task at hand. Well, he declared, because he had spent some time in England, he thought it would be a nice touch to talk not only about the U.S. but about England as well. And then: “I know something about the President of the United States, but I don’t know much about the President of England. What can you tell me about the President of England?”

I swear that the foregoing is true, and I have a witness.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Do government agencies perform better when they’re headed by career executives or by political appointees? This age-old debate was given new life in the wake of the federal government’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina — especially that of FEMA, the lead agency for emergency responding. FEMA was widely seen as being overloaded with political appointees, and the FEMA director, Michael D. Brown, became a lightning rod for criticism; Brown, it turned out, had joined FEMA after being forced to resign as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, hardly a background that would have seemed to qualify him to head the federal government’s top emergency responder.

The generic issue of political appointees v. careerists revolves around two very different schools of thought. In one, career bureaucrats are regarded as drones who couldn’t make it, or were reluctant even to try, in the private sector, and as culls who are left over after their more upwardly-mobile colleagues have departed for greener pastures. As seen from that perspective, appointees from outside the civil service system bring much-needed energy, innovativeness, and responsiveness to the top levels of government agencies. Appointees may also enjoy other advantages over careerists as high-level managers, drawing on generalist experience rather than narrow expertise and capitalizing on relationships with their political superiors.

However, career government executives have advantages of their own. In a word, they’re less likely to be political “hacks.” Having worked their way up through the chairs of an agency, they’re more likely to possess subject area expertise, an intimate working knowledge of the agency itself, and management skills that are directly applicable in a public sector settring.

In “Testing Pendleton’s Promise: Do Political Appointees Make Worse Bureaucrats?” (gated), published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Politics, David Lewis puts these competing perspectives to the test. Analyzing the Bush administration’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) scores (a numerical performance measure for federal programs), Lewis finds that programs administered by careerists get higher scores than those run by political appointees. The more pertinent experience and longer tenure of the careerists give them a leg up as managers. Importantly, these advantages are not offset by the political appointees’ higher educaiton levels, more extensive private or not-for-profit management experience, and more varied work experience — none of which correlate with agency performance. Lewis’s conclusion? “Reducing the number of appointees or increased sensitivity to appointee selection based upon certain background characteristics could improve federal bureau management” — a point with which the victims of Katrina would certainly concur.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The working class is the skeleton of our system.

We have got our war assignments. We are to be the killed civilians.

What I experienced in our brotherly union, I wouldn’t wish on my own brother.

These are Serbian political aphorisms, discussed in this interesting piece. I can only assume they are even better untranslated.

What are the best American political aphorisms?

Posted by John Sides at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)