In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, the public and their concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … Recovering voters’ respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how the public will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to prove an electoral tonic.

John, of course, has been all over this. However, he merely has ‘data’ and ‘analysis’ on his side. Clive Crook, in contrast, has the punditocracy’s trump card - confidently-worded assertions. Less sarcastically (OK - only slightly less sarcastically), when I become world dictator, my first act will be to decree that pundits who promiscuously write about how “the public” thinks this or that, without any reference to data on what the ‘public’ (a dubious concept in most of these debates anyway) actually thinks will be required, under pain of death, to rewrite their columns so as to substitute the word “I” and related personal pronouns/possessive adjectives for the word “the public” throughout. In the interim, readers are invited to make the necessary substitutions themselves. As illustrated by the following

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, me and my concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … My respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how I will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to win my vote.

which happily has the dual advantage of being punchier and more accurate than the original.

Instead, the Greek crisis turned into a three-part opportunity for Germany: The country has dramatically boosted its exports thanks to a weak euro, a German is now the front-runner to head the European Central Bank, and it can now justify cracking the whip on the rest of the Eurozone — the group of nations that use the euro.

So conclude Thomas Meaney and my GW colleague Harris Mylonas, writing in the Los Angeles Times. They are a bit bullish on the long-term consequences of the Greek crisis:

What hasn’t yet shattered the EU just might make it stronger.

Find their piece here.

Political science suggests two basic motivations for legislative behavior: ensuring their own reelection and pursuing changes in policy that move that policy closer to their own preferred policy. So let’s posit a world where Republicans believe that the current version of health care reform will in fact move policy farther from their preferred policy in terms of health care. The behavior we observe is vehement opposition to this bill, but going beyond simply voting against it to measures that seem genuinely targeted at try to ensure its defeat, such as trying to persuade individual Democrats to defect, threatening all sorts of procedural maneuvers to defeat the bill, etc. What can we conclude then about the beliefs of Republicans about the likely electoral effect of health care reform passing and/or their relative weighting of electoral vs. policy concerns?

It seems to me that we have to be living in one of these three versions of the world:

Republicans don’t really believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, and therefore there is no trade-off between opposing health care reform and seeking re-election (ie., they buy the point I made in my previous post).

Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but dislike it so much that we have a real example of policy concerns trumping electoral concerns in their attempts to defeat the bill.

Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but feel that in order to maintain credibility with the voters they need to appear to be trying to defeat it in every way possible. So electoral concerns still trump policy concerns (ie., privately Republicans want it to pass so they will do better in the coming elections), but politics dictate that the party keep up the appearance of opposing the bill.

Any thoughts on which of these scenarios are in play? I guess a final option is that the Republicans believe it is inevitable that health care reform will indeed pass, but they think if they repeat “health care reform will cost the Democrats the House and the Senate” enough times, it will become a dominant narrative heading into the campaign and help with the 2010 elections. So in this case it wouldn’t be a trade-off so much, but just making the best of a bad situation.

On Saturday, March 6, Togo’s election commission declared President Faure Gnassingbe the winner of the March 4 presidential election with 1.2 million votes out of 2.1 million cast (60.9% of the total) for his second term in office, following nearly 40 years of rule by his father. Turnout was 64% of registered voters. The primary opposition candidate, Jean-Pierre Fabre of the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), received 34% of the vote (detailed results are available at the commission’s website).

President Gnassingbe is the son of the late Gnassingbe Eyadema, who took the presidency in 1967 in a coup and ruled until his death in 2005, after which the constitution was suspended and Gnassingbe declared president by the army and the ruling party, the Rally for the Togolese People (RPT). In response to domestic and international pressure, Gnassingbe stood for his first election later that year, which he won (amid violence and alleged fraud) with 60.2% of the vote, according to the official numbers. Turnout in 2005 was also the same as it was last week, 64%.

As has been the case in previous elections, the opposition accused the ruling party of fixing the election. One complaint was that military personnel were allowed to vote early. The government responded that the early voting was necessary to enable the armed forces to maintain peace and order during the elections. Furthermore, they claimed that they were successful in doing this without the violence that has marred previous elections, including hundreds killed in the 2005 presidential election, when results were protested by the opposition as fraudulent. Most of the election this year was peaceful, and what conflict did occur was of a decidedly lower magnitude. The day before the election, a throng of RPT supporters met a parade of UFC supporters, “each side claimed victory and heckled one another, all in good spirit and without animosity” (ibid). After the election, protests were small: “Police spokesman Abalo Assih says officers in the capital earlier fired tear gas on some 200 protesters angry that the opposition party was trailing”. International observers said they saw no overt signs of fraud, only some vote-buying.

The opposition has repeatedly suffered (with few exceptions) from an inability to unify behind a single opposition candidate, and the same was true last week. In addition to Fabre for the UFC, Yawovi Agboyibo of the Action Committee for Renewal (CAR) and four minor party candidates contested the election. Perhaps the UFC and CAR, who won 45% versus the RPT’s 39% in the 2007 legislative elections, could have won the presidency if they had agreed to a single candidate. The opposition would have had a chance to unite after an initial round if they had succeeded in convincing the RPT to return to a two-round election system, but the RPT refused, meaning only a plurality remained necessary for victory. The two opposition parties attempted for months to agree on a single candidate, but neither would agree to the other party’s choice. Although the electoral code was amended in 2009 to eliminate the residency requirements that disqualified Olympio in previous contests, he withdrew his candidacy because of health problems, and former party secretary-general Jean-Pierre Fabre stood for the UFC. The CAR’s Agboyibo came in third with 3% of the vote (slightly worse than his 5% third place finish in 2005). In addition to a lack of unity, the opposition parties suffered from inferior resources. For example, “the incumbent toured the country by helicopter, while the other seven candidates had to use modest modes of transport to canvas for votes”.

In the Netherlands, however, the debate has mostly been about the extent to which these choices for family over high-profile public careers reflect a turning point in the struggle to make men equal caretakers. Some use national statistics to show that there is still an enormous gap in caretaking responsibilities while others argue that a similar choice by a female politician would lead to quite different reactions (“she’s giving up!” as opposed to “what an enlightened man we have here!”). Yet, most people do not question that these men are indeed sincere in their desires to forego a realistic opportunity to become the most powerful man in the Netherlands in exchange for more time with their families. (This discussion at Crooked Timber is revealing of the different responses by people from different political cultures).

1. It’s the old-boy’s network. Kaus is friends with Michael Kinsley etc. and they hired him on at a big salary because that’s what friends are for.

2. Kaus really is worth it: some analysis of hits reveals that he’s actually bringing in $80,000 worth of readers each year.

I guess #2 is probably correct—Slate is a web-business, after all. I’m reminded of the dictum that the most effective strategy for being a successful blogger is to have started blogging before the end of 2003. (Before that point, the blogosphere was small enough that everybody linked to everybody else.)

The other thing that Yglesias’s note made me realize was how much of a bubble I live in. $80,000 sounds like so little that I wondered where Kaus gets the rest of his income. Really, though, lots of people are doing just fine on less than $80/year. Kaus actually wrote a book many years ago arguing that, rather than aiming for equality of incomes, we should aim for a society in which you can live comfortably without a lot of money.

At the time, I expressed some skepticism because, amid all the news reports, I couldn’t find any description of exactly what they did. Also, as a statistician, I have some sense of the limitations of so-called “mathematical models” (or, worse, “computer models”).

Then today I ran across this article from Laurie Abraham shooting down this research in more details, so I’d share it with you.

First, she reviews the hype:

He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman’s team checked on the same couples’ marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced. . . .

“He’s gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages,” Malcolm Gladwell enthused in Blink, “that he says he can be at a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children.”

In a 2007 survey asking psychotherapists to elect the 10 most influential members of their profession over the last quarter-century, Gottman was only one of four who made the cut who wasn’t deceased.

Then the good news:

Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following:

A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5.

B. Somebody out there has suggested that this should be a disorder, but it is not part of the current proposal.

C. I [Srivastava] made it up.

Answers will be posted in the comments section [of Srivastava’s blog, linked above].

Second, and more puzzling, two of the politicians who stood to gain most from these developments have decided in the last two days that they need to spend more time with their families (see also here). PvdA leader Wouter Bos, who was much beleaguered before the crisis but came out of it the undisputable leader of his party, made the announcement today. This follows a similar announcement by Camiel Eurlings, who was seen as the crown prince for current prime minister Balkenende.

Third, the recent polls and local election results imply that the prospect of Geert Wilders’ PVV becoming the largest party is a realistic one. In the Netherlands, the largest party almost always delivers the prime-minister. Speculation on what this would mean will have to wait until another blog post. In the mean time, go read why Daniel Pipes is enthusiastic about it and even calls him “the most important European alive today” while Ian Buruma is a little less impressed with Wilders.

Learning the hard way?

It is well known that there are people who actually like getting slapped – but it is puzzling to discover such a penchant with the right-wing parties and business organizations in Switzerland. Or then it must be some mixture of naïveté and stubbornness that makes them impermeable to learning any lesson from past failures. The latest slap is the massive (almost 73% of the votes) rejection of occupational pension cutbacks at the polls, in a direct democratic referendum that took place this Sunday March 7th. The result is a downright triumph for the left and trade unions – especially in a country where the combined Left (Social Democrats and Greens) gained less than 30% of the votes in the last national parliamentary elections .

However, the result of the referendum is not at all surprising to anyone familiar with welfare politics in Switzerland (and – for that matter – OECD democracies in general). And it is not – contrary to what the conservative newspaper NZZ, business leaders and right-wing politicians try to argue – the result of a confusing campaign, a “momentary state of uncertainty” among voters or their “denial of reality”. A denial of reality seems rather to be prevailing among the right, which pushed this proposal through parliament and into to direct democratic circus maximus. Indeed, the result of the referendum is exactly what we would expect in the light of the past 15 years of research on welfare politics in the age of austerity. Here’s why.

In the 1990s, Paul Pierson made a huge impact in the field when he explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate. On this basis, he predicted policy stability. More recent research, spearheaded by Swiss political scientist Giuliano Bonoli , proved him wrong by demonstrating that reforms could be achieved, under the condition that governments combine cutbacks with elements that benefit the most precarious social groups, mostly low-skilled, young and female voters. In a book that will be out with CUP this month, I have shown that this kind of “package deals” has become a necessary condition for successful pension reforms over the last 20 years, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, France and other European countries. The 2003 reform of the pension scheme in Switzerland, for example, did combine the same kind of occupational pension cutbacks that were rejected on Sunday with more generous protection of low-income earners. This combination led to a two-dimensional reform space that allowed for a very broad support coalition among parties and interest organizations of both the left and right (all actors in the green ellipse). The Swiss Union of Trade Unions SGB (the only actor consistently critical of the reform package) had learnt in earlier campaigns that it would be hardly possible to win a popular referendum all on their own, with part of the left supporting the reform. Hence, it refrained from challenging the 2003 proposal in a referendum and the reform could be enacted.

So instead of being recorded as absent, the council members have a technological fix: The chamber’s voting software is set to automatically register each of the 15 lawmakers as a “yes” unless members deliberately press a button to vote “no.”

The “yes” votes then flash on video screens throughout the chamber — and are placed in the clerk’s official record — even when members have left to grab a snack in the hall or hold a meeting.

It gets better.

Last year, for example, Alarcon made concurrent meetings so routine that he scheduled them on his official appointment calendar to coincide with the council’s regular 10 a.m. public sessions. The calendar showed he had appointments planned during 57 council meetings last year.

And better!

The rules of the council state that members must activate their own voting machines and must be within the council chamber to be counted as present. But the city attorney who advises the council said his office has defined the “chamber” to include the back rooms, bathrooms and news conference area, all of which are out of public view.

More is here.

[Hat tip to John Balz.]

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers.We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

This made me wonder whether the translate engine has already become a useful research tool for scholars of comparative and international politics. I don’t think an automatic translation tool can ever fully replace knowledge of languages but perhaps it is able to provide a quick sense of what’s going on in a foreign place. As the article puts it:

Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people. “If you need a rough-and-ready translation, it’s the place to go,” said Philip Resnik, a machine translation expert and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My first experiment was not very encouraging. I was curious about the response to Real Madrid’s elimination from the Champions League last night after spending record amounts on high profile players. According to Google Translate, the Madrid coach Pellegrini said he will quit his job (see also here), whereas the Spanish version says the opposite “No voy a renunciar a mi puesto.”

I would love to hear some experiences of researchers with more political texts. My first thought is that it might be a useful way to take a first cut at documents in languages one reads slowly but that it is not (yet) a tool that is ready to be applied to languages one doesn’t understand at all.

In my intro class yesterday, we began a discussion of presidency and I noted that presidents face the challenge of leadership: they confront high expectations even as the Constitution affords them little formal power. (How they have accumulated power in other ways comes later.) As evidence for high expectations, I noted how much the media focus on the president and, in doing so, perhaps exaggerate the extent of presidential power — a point I’ve discussed before. To illustrate, I put together this montage of Time covers from the 2008 campaign and the Obama presidency.