Blogging beyond my comparative advantage

2009-07-01T19:51:28Z 2009-07-01T19:51:28Z Blogging beyond my comparative advantage 2009-07-01T19:51:28Z

I really don’t have any particular insight to add to others’ discussion of the sorta-kinda-maybe coup d’état in Honduras, but Steven Taylor (both <a href="http://www.poliblogger.com/?p=16160">here</a> and <a href="http://www.poliblogger.com/?p=16154">here</a>) and <a href="http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/">Greg Weeks</a> have had some fairly insightful posts on the matter. While I’d probably say that many Hondurans’ fears that maybe-ex-President Zelaya was plotting in some way to perpetuate his own rule at the expense of democratic accountability—as both Hugo Chávez and Álvaro Uribe have recently done in the broader region—were possibly justified, employing the military to raid his house and toss him on an airplane in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly strike me as the most measured response by the other branches of government. On the other hand I’ll gladly concede that the Honduran constitution appears to be a giant mess of epic proportions (amendment by decree and the lack of an impeachment mechanism being among its defects) that didn’t exactly help in avoiding an escalation of the situation to the use of extralegal means. Elsewhere: John Carey (via John Sides) presents some <a href="http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/07/some_data_on_latin_american_co.html">data on extraordinary Latin American presidential replacements</a> since 1990. It almost, but not quite, tempts me to dust off <a href="http://www.cnlawrence.com/papers/#stability">my old paper on stability and presidential government</a> and add some new data, but I think it’s best for all involved if it just stays in Ukrainian, at least until I can find a <del>sucker</del> graduate student interested in collecting the data to update the damn thing to the present. http://blog.lordsutch.com/archives/4265 http://blog.lordsutch.com/atom.cgi/entryid=4265