Professor Bainbridge links the text of the California anti-gerrymandering initiative. It looks more-or-less like a good idea to me, but the selection procedure for the “special masters” looks overly complicated. But, I suppose, that’s the way California politics works…

Unlike James Joyner, I don’t see a problem with plans by the OSCE to observe this November’s presidential election. Indeed, I think I’d put this one under the category of leadership by example: if we expect thugocracies and ex-thugocracies to admit OSCE observers to assure free and fair elections (consider, for example, the ousting of the Sandinista government from Nicaragua in 1990, which would not have been possible without outside election monitors), the least we can do is allow them to observe our elections too.

The predictable refrain is that this will somehow help the “liberal media” paint this election as illegitimate. My gut feeling is that, even if the media were so inclined, they’ll certainly be able to find plenty enough evidence of corruption and malfeasance by election officials on their own.

Elsewhere: Alex Knapp largely agrees with me, while Robert Garcia Tagorda cheekily says it’s Bush multilateralism in action.

Apologies for the relative silence as of late. Tests to grade, articles to referee, karaoke to sing, ladies to woo—you know the drill.

In keeping with Brock’s posting, I probably ought to offer some advice for incoming freshmen and graduate students. A former Ole Miss professor had what was infamously described as the “Bull Durham speech,” which is deeply pessimistic but nonetheless accurate, and was known to send potential grad students away in fits of tears. Personally, I think Monty Python said it best: “Run Away! Run Away!”

Mike Hollihan explains in detail why neither major party can afford not to run respectable candidates, even in seemingly unwinnable races.

I did something quite uncharacteristic today: I went out of my way to be rude to some people. A small group (I’d say 6–8 people, mostly college-age kids) of protestors or leafleters or something had set up shop in front of the graduate library, and were intent on wasting my time on my daily walk from my barely-furnished hovel to my office. The central feature of the event was a sign that said “Bush Intelligence Czar = Oxymoron”—which, I suppose, made more sense to them than it did to me, especially considering that Bush got better grades than Al Gore did in college. But why let the facts get in the way of your preconceived notions?

I suppose the proper behavior for a political scientist would have been to stop, listen to whatever they had to say, and thank them for acting in the civic spirit—and then come here and belittle them in my blog. Unfortunately for them, I was hungry, annoyed (after walking a mile), and not really in the mood for Chomsky-lite on the way to my lunch. So I blew right past them, trading barbs with a particularly moronic member of the group who insisted on shoving some paper in my face. Mea maxima culpa.

I really, really need to get out of this town.

Update: I’ve made this my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam. Later, I found some of their literature (an incredibly amusing “platform” that I’m confident was not adopted in Boston), and it turns out they were LaRouchies. Now I don’t feel quite so bad…

Charles Pickering (who the national Democratic Party would have you believe is a racist hatemonger, even if many Mississippi Democrats and the reliably left-wing Clarion-Ledger editorial board disagree) just issued a ruling in a racial segregation case, and somehow managed to do so without declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unconstitutional. Stuart Buck and Howard Bashman have more.

Past posts on the Pickering smear campaign here.

Brock’s post reminds me to share my (past) favorite name for Bellevue: “The God Complex.” But now I think I have a new favorite…

Since it’s the cool thing to do, I decided to take Michelle Malkin’s diversity test. Apparently, you get 5 points for every statement you agree with.

1. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life. No.
2. I think my taxes are too high. Yes.
3. I supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Yes.
4. I voted for President Bush in 2000. No.
5. I am a gun owner. No.
6. I support school voucher programs. Yes.
7. I oppose condom distribution in public schools. Yes. The bastards ought to have to pay for them, just like the rest of us do.
8. I oppose bilingual education. No.
9. I oppose gay marriage. No.
10. I want Social Security privatized. Yes.
11. I believe racial profiling at airports is common sense. No.
12. I shop at Wal-Mart. Yes (but not when I’m in Michigan, because Meijer is better up here). Do I get bonus points for also shopping at Sam’s Club?
13. I enjoy talk radio. No. I’d rather have my teeth pulled sans anesthesia.
14. I am annoyed when news editors substitute the phrase “undocumented person” for “illegal alien.” Yes.
15. I do not believe the phrase “a chink in the armor” is offensive. Yes. Etymology, it’s a wonderful thing.
16. I eat meat. Yes.
17. I believe O.J. Simpson was guilty. Yes.
18. I cheered when I learned that Saddam Hussein had been captured. Yes.
19. I cry when I hear “Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood. Yes. (There goes any chance of me ever being seen as “macho.”)
20. I don’t believe the New York Times. No, I believe more than 50% of what’s in the New York Times. Not all of it, mind you…

Well, I scored 60/100. What do I win?

Jeff Jacoby has a moderately interesting column in today’s Boston Globe about reforming the redistricting process, citing Iowa’s use of an independent commission to set constituency boundaries—a practice that is also followed in Commonwealth countries like Britain and Canada. Needless to say, I’m generally in favor of such proposals; however, I do think there are two issues that ought to be of concern:

• If many or all districts are competitive, small vote swings—say, a nationwide increase in Democratic support by 1%—will lead to large changes in representation, a problem seen regularly in British and Canadian elections. Existing gerrymandered “safe seats” pretty much guarantee that small vote swings will only affect a limited number of seats, negating much of the “manufactured majority” aspect of plurality elections.
• Dilution of majority-minority districts, and other Voting Rights Act issues, could be problematic in states that are less homogenous than Iowa—which would be, er, most states. On the other hand, many of the most egregious districts from a gerrymandering point of view were specifically designed to meet VRA requirements. (This is less of an issue for people like me, who believe substantive policy representation is more important than descriptive representation, even though there is some evidence that at least some degree of descriptive representation improves policy responsiveness to minority groups.)

I also think most of the benefits of ending gerrymandering could be arrived at by using so-called “mixed PR” electoral systems—even a few “top up” seats in most states would negate all but the most egregious gerrymanders. However, about half the states don’t have enough representatives to make “mixed PR” really work for federal elections, and I’m not one of those who thinks the House of Representatives should be much bigger (although I would increase probably increase its size to allow any state not declining in population to not lose seats, and would definitely increase its size if a new state were admitted to the Union). Even in smaller states, though, I think it would be of value in state legislative elections.

For further reading: some recent discussion of the merits of top-up PR is available from Mandos of Points of Information and Andrew Coyne, albeit in the Canadian context.

Globe link via Eugene Volokh.

Pieter of Peaktalk is the latest person I’ve seen who notes an incredibly small “undecided” share of the electorate.

It seems to me that this flies in the face of everything political scientists believe about presidential elections; while the default reaction of most partisans, and independent leaners, is to vote for their party’s nominee (despite the caveat of reciprocal causation—party identification is influenced, in part, by the candidates fielded by the parties), it seems unusual for voters to declare themselves so firmly committed in the early stages of the fall campaign, and usually there is some shifting in commitments over time as the campaign continues. By contrast, the media analysis seems to reflect the degree of elite polarization, which—while high—is typical of presidential campaigns.

I somewhat agree with both Glenn Reynolds and Lorie Byrd that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad (link only works in Internet Explorer) is “devastating”—mind you, leaving aside the truth of the charges it makes against John Kerry. And I think the Kerry campaign is going to have to do much better than threatening to sue any TV station or network that airs the ad, even if the ad is maliciously false and libelous under the NY Times v. Sullivan standard—a legal standard public opinion doesn’t care much about.

That said, charges of lunacy toward some of the “Swift Boat Veterans” (say that six times fast!) are flying on both sides of the political aisle, while Steven Taylor is skeptical and cautious, but points out three reasons that the SBVfT account of events may indeed be credible:

1. It strikes me as odd that a large number of veterans would come together to make these allegations, knowing the amount of public and media scrutiny they would have to endure. ...
2. The leader of this group, and the first named author on the book, Houston lawyer John O’Neil, has had some compelling character witnesses, if you will, who also give me pause for thought. ...
3. Mr. Kerry’s own words give credence to some of the accusations.

On the other hand, I agree with von of Obsidian Wings that it’d be real nice to have the actual evidence these accusations are based on before pronouncing judgment on their veracity—or, for that matter, the sanity of Kerry’s accusers.

For some odd reason, the ntp server on my laptop refuses to keep sync with any servers on the Internet; instead, it’s decided to just go off and run several minutes slow, for some odd reason I can’t quite understand. Maybe it’s a 2.6.8-rc kernel bug or something. I noticed it yesterday too—my laptop lost nearly a half-hour over a day, somehow.

Stephen Bainbridge (via Glenn Reynolds) isn’t impressed with the use of NOMINATE scores to cast John Kerry as more of a centrist; nor is he particularly thrilled with methods like NOMINATE to begin with:

Personally, I find the interest group scores much more accessible and transparent. For one thing, NOMINATE counts all nonunanimous roll calls, which can include a lot of procedural and uncontroversial (even nonpartisan) bills. The interest group rankings focus on bills that really tell us something about the political philosophy of the candidate in question. For another, the interest group ratings are widely used both by the media and, perhaps more important, by politicians themselves.

I’d respond that NOMINATE (and related methods) are preferable to interest group scores precisely because they count all nonunanimous roll calls; this avoids the selection effect where interest groups choose, say, twenty “key” votes as a litmus test for an entire session. And, presumably, those who vote on party lines on “nonpartisan” and “uncontroversial” bills are even more partisan than those who join with their natural opposition. Another worthy point in favor of NOMINATE: the “procedural” versus “substantive” distinction is largely subjective; cloture votes in the Senate, for example, are technically procedural motions to end debate (and potentially stop a filibuster), while procedural votes on rules in the House often have serious substantive consequences (by ruling certain amendments out-of-order, framing and controlling debate, and sometimes even amending the legislation in question).

Now, Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers are quite correct to point out that the statistical properties of NOMINATE are, at best, nebulous, although Lewis and Poole recently made a worthy effort to gain additional leverage on the bias and uncertainty of NOMINATE in Political Analysis. And, while some of the differences in the results of the techniques are the result of differences between the distributional assumptions of NOMINATE and the CJR scaling method* (which explains the differing positions of Kerry in years in which he missed a lot of roll calls), there are some good reasons to prefer the CJR technique—most notably, it’s significantly more tractable; you can estimate the model almost trivially using MCMCpack.

Anyway, for those with a morbid curiosity about these techniques, the latest American Political Science Review has an article by Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers called “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data,” which I recommend highly (and which you may or may not be able to access via this link).

I’ve posted previously on NOMINATE and related methods (again, in relation to John Kerry’s voting record) here and here. This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Michael Totten has the scoop on the latest idiocy from the Memphis city council, this time perpetrated by city council chairman Joe Brown, who barred a group of visiting Iraqi officials from city hall, apparently out of concern that they were terrorists. Nor could the city or county mayor be bothered to meet with the group. On the bright side (?), at least they did get to meet mayoral aspirant and city councilwoman Carol Chumney, albeit not at city hall. Needless to say, Memphis-area residents are uniformly shocked, but not all that surprised, by this boorish behavior from their elected leaders.

One suspects that, overall, the Iraqis are better off not having had a chance to meet these rather dubious examples of American officialdom, lest they set a bad example.

Update: Mike Hollihan has more on the fallout from this mess; Chumney is making some political hay with the issue, but I honestly don’t see how she beats Herenton in a head-to-head contest, despite the latter apparently being under investigation by the FBI.

One of the little ways us wanna-be professors make a little side money (a couple hundred bucks a pop) is by reviewing textbooks for publishers. At the moment, I’m reviewing an American government textbook for its n+1th edition, which is nothing unusual, except what they sent me to review is the nth edition—which I already had a copy of at home anyway, since I was planning to adopt it for American government in the fall until O’Connor and Sabato was foisted upon me. So I guess I’m technically “pre-reviewing” it, or “post-reviewing” the nth edition, or something. And, in four chapters, I’ve only managed to come up with about a page of comments (and mostly silly stuff like “Unorthodox Lawmaking rocks, add it to the recommended readings on Congress,” rather than stuff like “only an idiot would write this paragraph”). I guess that means it’s a good book or something, but for $X I think they want more than a page of comments.

Michael Jennings has been taking a crash course in R and S-PLUS programming. I’d still have to say my R is quite weak, for largely the same reasons my Perl is pretty weak—there’s too much overlap with C, which leads to bad coding style.

Probably the moral of the story is either that I need to start working with RPy, or need to figure out how to convince colleagues that becoming more proficient in R (and contributing to it) is hireable/tenurable activity.

Since arriving in Ann Arbor last week, I’ve had something of a curious reaction to the revelation that I have a job. The near-uniform reaction, after hearing the details of the position, is that it’s a “heavy” load—which, given that it’s three courses a semester (or “3–3,” in the lingo) and five* preparations over the year, I suppose is a fair assessment, although it’s something of a godsend compared to the 4–4s at complete backwaters (“Research support? That’s your desk.”) I interviewed for, and the load itself doesn’t account for the relatively small classes or the generally engaged undergraduate student body. It’s enough to put something of a damper on my enthusiasm for starting my job in the fall.

Now, it’s possible that these folks just aren’t attuned to the realities of the academic job market, or perhaps just don’t recognize that for many potential scholars, taking a job at a non-Ph.D.-granting institution is a necessity rather than a preference. But it’s also possible that they’re on to something; is it possible that several years’ training as a researcher and methodologist is pretty much wasted if most of what I do the rest of my career is teach “textbook” political science and bivariate regression to undergraduates? Should I really settle for teaching three classes a semester when I could go elsewhere and teach three courses a year, if the research expectations for tenure are such that I’d end up doing the same amount of work anyway, especially when you account for the lack of graduate assistants?

The decision may, in the end, be made for me—if this past year’s experience is any guide, serious research institutions aren’t exactly clamoring to hire graduates of lower-tier (or even middle-tier) Ph.D. programs. But I suppose it’s something I’ll have to bear in mind this fall.

Glenn Reynolds links a USA Today report on its post-convention poll:

Last week’s Democratic convention boosted voters’ impressions of John Kerry but failed to give him the expected bump in the head-to-head race against President Bush, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds.

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, Bush led Kerry 50%-46% among likely voters. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was at 2%.

The survey showed Kerry losing 1 percentage point and Bush gaining 4 percentage points from a poll taken the week before the Boston convention.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of ±4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless surprising, the first time since the chaotic Democratic convention in 1972 that a candidate hasn’t gained ground during his convention.

In fairness, the report’s headline (“Poll: No boost for Kerry after convention”) is appropriate, and I’m generally all for the reporting of null results when they are substantively interesting. But I wonder how many readers will really appreciate the meaninglessness of the change in support, given that the disclaimer is after the discussion of the marginals, which show a statistical dead heat and zero meaningful change since the previous poll.

I went to the 11:10 pm show of Dodgeball last night, and found it hysterically funny. Ben Stiller as fitness magnate/doofus White Goodman is clearly the central comedic character (and parry to Vince Vaughn’s slacker straight man character), but I found the pairing of Gary Cole (as “Cotton McKnight”) and Jason Bateman (“Pepper Brooks”) as the ESPN8 commentary team the perfect send-up of sportscaster pretentiousness and inanity. Plus, you’ve got to applaud including a bar named “The Dirty Sanchez” in a PG-13 film.

As James Joyner notes, Nomar Garciaparra was traded from the Red Sox to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that would seem to put the Cubs in a pretty good position, but which looks to David Pinto like something of a firesale for the Sox—even though they did get Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in the deal.

I suppose this also means that Jimmy Fallon will have to learn to play another character than “annoying Boston guy who screams ‘Nomar’ and makes out with Rachel Dratch at the drop of a hat.” But given SNL’s track record on such things, maybe not…

Nick Troester (apparently, it rhymes with “toaster”) is under the impression that last evening’s events fall under the Chatham House Rules. My personal perspective is that it’d be hard to enforce those rules, considering that all activities took place in public venues, but I’m still leaning toward relative confidentiality, if only for the sake of the honor of our mixed company (or at least for my continued employment).

I will, however, note that Kevin, Leslie, and I did make it to the ICPSR picnic on Saturday, something that cannot be said for others of our group.

BTW, I did find my hat… it was in my backpack all along.

Chip Taylor solicits comment from political scientists on last weekend’s New York Times Magazine piece on the efforts to create a Democratic-leaning interest group infrastructure to rival the similar arrangements on the right. He writes:

That made me think about the Reform Party. After Perot was done dabbling in presidential politics, the Reform Party infrastructure was left with no real leader or agenda. It did have state and local party officials across the country, ballot access in many states, and eligibility for at least one more round of public funding for its presidential candidate.

Consequently there was a struggle between Buchanan and his organization and (if memory serves) the Natural Law Party apparatus (such as it is was). Neither was exactly committed to the principles of the Reform Party (to the extent that they existed); they were after the political assets of the Reform Party organization.

Now, I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is anywhere near the empty shell the post-Perot Reform Party was. But it seems that to the extent it is composed of coalitions of disparate interest groups, it is more vulnerable to a “hostile takeover.”

I wrote about this topic late last year:

With the institutional power of American parties in rapid decline relative to both candidates and interest groups (witness George Soros’ large donation to MoveOn.org, rather than the Democrats), thanks to the incumbency advantage, widespread adoption of open primaries, and McCain-Feingold, it seems likely that the United States will see more of these fights for the heart and soul of the party, as candidates and interest groups try to gain control of the remaining institutional advantages of the major parties—their automatic access to the ballot and their “brand recognition.” Why build a third party from scratch when you can just hijack the Republicans or Democrats?

More broadly, I think American politics has moved away from the system of parties articulating voter preferences (articulated in part here by James Joyner) to a system in which interest groups are the primary vehicle for public influence of the political process—with electoral competition something of a vestigial sideshow, necessitated more by constitutional requirements and the need for some elected oversight of the bureaucracy than it is required for functioning representative government. I don’t know that the central thesis here is anything too original—go read Schattschneider or Dahl—but I think political actors have finally come to recognize this reality in a way that they didn’t before, prodded largely by the search for loopholes in campaign finance laws and continual weakening of the institutional position of political parties in the system.

I think Bryan Caplan has really stepped in one here:

Larry Bartels has gotten national attention for his work on Bush’s income tax cut, inheritance tax cut, and public opinion. (Here is the full article; here is the digest version; here is what Alex Tabarrok had to say about Bartels). Bartels’ main point is that public opinion verges on contradictory: the public believes that inequality has gone up, agrees that inequality is bad, agrees that the rich should pay more taxes, BUT still supports two tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

Bartels is right, although since I belong to the tiny minority of people who favors however much inequality the free market delivers, for once I have to celebrate the public’s folly.

What Bartels does not seem to realize, however, is that the contradiction he laments is only one of many. [emphasis added]

I suspect very strongly that Prof. Bartels does realize this, as he is one of the foremost experts on public opinion in American politics. Mind you, Caplan’s broader post is a nice primer on the contradictions in public opinion that political scientists have known about (and attempted to explain) since the 1960s—contradictions that Bartels, and any other political scientist studying public opinion, would be well aware of.

Tyler Cowen calls on Dan Drezner to self-assign p values to his fence-sitting. My gut feeling is that this approach would be ineffective; based on the cognitive psychology literature, I’d have to conclude that Dan is probably not the best judge of his own objective probabilities. Instead, I recommend employing content analysis of Dan’s posts to arrive at estimated p values at given points in time, or using a panel of raters, or some other more accurate technique.

Incidentally, the only p value I have a good handle on for myself is that p=1.00 that, on election night, I will be sitting with my undergraduate methods class at some venue with available libations making fun of Brokaw, Rather, and/or Jennings on the big-screen as they call (and uncall) states. Assuming the dean doesn’t put the kibosh on the short field trip, that is…

Here’s my lame-ass election prediction: Kerry wins. And you can take that to the bank. At least, you can take it to the bank that you took my “Dean will be the nominee and Osama (not to be confused with Obama) will get a woody” prediction to (I suspect the tellers there aren’t that bright).

Now if I can just buy the Kreskin outfit and crystal ball prop from the local magic supply store, I’ll have some real respect in this discipline.