Alex Knapp is not at all impressed with the spread of touchscreen voting and thinks it will ultimately create more problems than it solves; I generally agree, especially given the less expensive and superior alternative: optical mark recognition (OMR) machines, which are essentially glorified Scantron machines that read ink circles instead of pencil marks. Put an OMR scanner or two in each precinct, and the only other equipment you need are some pens and the proper machine-readable paper ballots. Not to mention that the audit trail is trivial: all you need to do is hang on to the ballots after they’re scanned.

Hei Lun of Begging To Differ wonders why conservatives are so worked up over the Specter-Toomey showdown in Pennsylvania. At some level, I suppose it’s the question northern liberals had to ask themselves in the 60s and 70s: do we continue to support conservative southern Democrats, and thereby retain our numerical superiority in Congress and keep the tent “big,” or do we follow our principles and try to get northern-style liberals to win the primary—and risk losing our majority by getting outflanked by the Republicans in the general election.

That said, a Specter defection to the Democrats would only be harmful to the GOP if it was a trigger for defection by the other northeastern Republicans (and therefore tipped the balance in the Senate), and the strategic calculus for Bush is such that the Olympia Snowes of the world will wonder—quite rightly—whether they would be next on the ideological purity “hit list” if Bush had endorsed Toomey over Specter.

On balance, I think both parties benefit from having moderates on their rosters—both for the public relations benefit of being able to claim something is “bipartisan” (a label that the media will apply to any legislation that has even one across-the-aisle supporter) and because they allow the parties to be competitive in areas that they otherwise wouldn’t be; Santorum-style conservatism may be viable for both Senate seats in Pennsylvania (though I suspect many Pennsylvanians think one Santorum is plenty), but it wouldn’t fly as well in other swing states.

Eugene Volokh links an interview with the departed (from the web, at least) Invisible Adjunct.

Amanda Butler, Will Baude, and Waddling Thunder ponder the role of the suit in modern society.

A sociologist friend of mine was quite surprised to witness the spectacle of political scientists parading around the Palmer House Hilton in suits—apparently, sociologists don’t dress up for conferences, but political scientists (for whatever reason) do. I tend to think the suit is best reserved for special occasions; I wouldn’t dream of teaching in a suit on a regular basis (and, in fact, have only done it once—when I had a job interview immediately after class—although I’ll be teaching in a suit tomorrow as well), and if I were the churchgoing sort, I probably wouldn’t wear a suit to church either. On the other hand, I like my suit, and I don’t even mind wearing a shirt and tie on a semi-regular basis (and I have been known to wear a shirt and tie when teaching). Plus my suit actually manages to make me look halfway respectable, which is no minor feat.

As for Ms. Butler’s complaints about footwear, I can empathize—finding comfortable dress shoes is something of a challenge for me, given my rather wide feet, although my recent pair of SAS leather shoes are remarkably comfortable (my mother swears by SAS). I honestly don’t pay much attention to the footwear that female political scientists wear at conferences, though they do tend to dress more casually than the men, so I suspect many eschew heels in favor of more comfortable footwear, a decision I wholeheartedly support.

I am also rather convinced that the only people, aside from those with various fetishes, who care what shoes women wear are other women. Not being a sociologist, though, I can’t explain why this would be the case or how this might affect one’s strategies in making more comfortable footwear acceptable for women’s business attire.

At the airport in Dallas† today, I broke down and bought a week-old Economist,* and in it I read about the then-current status of the Cyprus deal—the European Union made an ill-advised deal with the Greek Cypriots that basically let them in the EU regardless of whether or not they held up their end of the bargain to reunite the island, on the not entirely unreasonable but nonetheless incorrect assumption that the Turks would be the more recalcitrant party. Now the other shoe has dropped, with the Greek Cypriots rejecting the deal, and everyone is sort of standing around holding their proverbial Johnsons in response.

The moral of this story is Game Theory 101: don’t reward someone for their anticipated good behavior in advance, because otherwise they’ll see no reason to uphold their end of the bargain.

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can think out loud. The drawback is pretty much anyone can stumble by and read your thoughts, and given my current situation on the job market, it is in my best interest for everyone to think I’ll leap at the chance to take their job offer (which, given that I have fairly transitive preferences, is emphatically not the case).

Nevertheless, I feel the need to ponder aloud. One of the faculty members I was out to dinner with tonight (at a pretty good Chinese restaurant—I guess I should have picked something else for dinner last night, since this was my second dinner of fried wontons and beef fried rice in two days) mentioned that his son is studying for the computerized GRE. The GRE actually has an interesting structure; in the olden days, you answered a block of N questions per section, and everyone answered the same N questions. Now, you answer M questions, and the test is adaptive—if you get questions right, it gives you harder ones, and if you get them wrong, you get easier ones. Thus, it is important to do well early—if you blow the first few questions, there’s almost no way to score in the 700s, because you’ll never get back to the hard questions that allow you to get such a high score. In other words, there is path dependency in the GRE: past actions dictate the range of choices you have available.

One suspects the job market is the same way. Aside from Overby’s career-improvement maxim—generally quoted as “any job is better than no job” (and, its corrollary, “never have an unpublishable thought”)—some jobs are better than others. Course load, service requirements, pay, appointment length (tenure-track versus non-tenure-track), location, and prestige all have effects.

Funnily enough, I think I’ve made my decision, more or less; there are basically two jobs I’d say yes to (one of which I’m pretty sure I’m not in the running for), two I’d have to seriously think about, and one I’d reject outright (there’s also a possibility in reserve which I’m not counting yet). Now I just need to find out what my options are, and react accordingly.

(I promise I’ll stop being so cryptic once I have signed a contract for the fall.)

This may be a good nominee for this year’s Darwin Awards: Diver in contest feared drowned. And this wasn’t any diving contest—it was a belly-flopping contest, at Diamond Jim’s bar in Beloit, Wisconsin.

The loss to society is immense, for not only did the unidentified 52-year-old man have “a heart of gold, a caring nature and a pleasant outlook on life,” he was also one of the few residents of Rock County who is certified to roast pigs. (Silly me didn’t realize pig-roasting required certification.) But I think the key to the story lies at the end:

His friend [the man who is presumed drowned] was planning on driving up to Reedsburg next weekend to roast a pig for a wedding reception and had asked Quaerna for directions.

“He’s originally from Mississippi. I don’t believe he had been that far north before,” Quaerna said.

What Quaerna doesn’t understand, is why his friend jumped from the bridge.

“He doesn’t know how to swim,” Quaerna said.

This story reminds me of nothing so much as the final track from Lewis Black’s first comedy album, The White Album (which also involved rednecks doing incredibly stupid things, only those rednecks were in Arkansas and ammunition was involved). Fun and amusement for the whole family!

Thanks to Scott for the link.

I’ve been tied up preparing for this job interview the last couple of days, so I haven’t gotten around to posting about the Iraq situation. Thankfully, Steven Taylor read my mind in his critique of the decision to hand over power on June 30th without figuring out who would be getting the power first (though the silver lining in this process is the belated jettisoning of Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq’s Charles de Gaulle wannabe), as well as his consideration of how the UN’s involvement in the handover is undercutting John Kerry’s position on Iraq.

My mini-contest garnered two entries. Brock proposed “alleged,” while my fellow Ole Miss alum Scott proposed “perceived.” Since “perceived” was the word I had in mind when I wrote the post, Scott wins the Signifying Nothing no-prize of having his name mentioned in my blog, along with my pity for knowing me well enough to read my thoughts.

I actually went with “public policy is a government plan of action that is intended to solve a perceived societal problem,” because I like adding words to definitions for amusement value. So, if you’re one of the lucky students in Dr. [redacted]’s American Government class at [redacted] University, you will be regaled with 50 minutes of quality lecture time on U.S. public policy from yours truly at 1 p.m. [redacted] Daylight Time on Monday, complete with color transparencies. Don’t forget reading material for the slow parts!

As expected, the near-legendary faculty review of Ole Miss Provost Carolyn Staton’s job performance was overwhelmingly negative, according to survey results obtained by The Daily Mississippian (who deserve kudos for even the vaguest attempt at investigatory journalism—heck, they deserve kudos for stringing together a coherent article, something rarely seen in the DM outside the Sports section). News at 11.

Though I have to give Bobby Khayat credit where it’s due—he runs a tighter ship than good ol’ Shelby Thames down at USM, and keeps things significantly closer to the straight-and-narrow, even if he engenders similar levels of animus from the faculty and students in the process.

Today’s Beltway Traffic Jam has a decidedly topical theme, given the gender role discussion that has swept this little corner of the 'sphere lately.

Hmm, maybe this phone interview isn’t going to happen after all… or it’s going to be about the shortest on record, one of the two.

Update: Shortest on record…

John Kerry is in denial over his ownership of a sport-utility vehicle. Like any responsible husband would, he blames his wife…

Surprisingly, though, he does fess up to owning a Dodge 600, a giant piece of 1980s Detroit iron that probably gets less gas mileage than his wife’s late-model Chevy Suburban.

Steven Taylor finds John Kerry discussing Vietnam in the oddest of places. My question: does the analogy make Cajuns “Charlie”?

Via Amish Tech Support:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here’s mine:

Then, thoughtfully, “Actually I’m rather tired of it.”

Faulkner it ain’t.

Laura of Apartment 11D thinks a war is brewing in academe between the parents and the childless:

Is this war new? I think so. With the pressures of the new economy, workers are turning on each other. Everybody else’s life looks better than their own. The parent workers are jealous of their single counterparts who can work uninterrupted, who get a full night’s sleep and a weekend off. The singles feel that they don’t have the excuse of a soccer game to get them out of a departmental meeting.

Since the decision to have kids has been framed in terms of choice, then that means that the chooser has to accept all the consequences. Of course, you could make the converse argument that the childless choose not to have children, and thus have to accept the consequences. [emphasis mine]

I suppose one can make that argument, but given the relative paucity of women beating on my door begging me to be a sperm donor, I think the “choice” aspect here is massively overstated.

On the other hand, the benefits of not having to convince a spouse and kids that (hypothetically speaking, of course) it’s a good idea for your career to spend the next winter digging out from under snow on the wild chance that a tenure line will open up the next year, especially when you’re turning down a tenure-track offer in much warmer climes to do it, probably shouldn’t be discounted…

Stephen Karlson is the latest to note the news that Duke is getting rid of its 8 a.m. classes in favor of 8:30 a.m. start times. He is also the first to note that the students may not actually be the impetus for the change:

[T]he clustering of classes in the 10 am to 3 pm time blocks, which contributes to a space crunch at many universities, reflects in part a revelation of preferences on the part of the faculty. Northern Illinois University wants at least one third of each department’s class offerings outside prime time. That, too, is not as big a problem for a night owl, or for a morning person. One colleague, now retired, would choose the 8 am classes, be in by 5 or 6 in the morning, and gone by 2 or 3 pm.

Given my future status as “low rung on the ladder,” I don’t expect to have my preferred sleep schedule worked into the formulation of the college bulletin. But I will say the way to this political scientist’s heart is to let him sleep in…

Jacob Levy notes that my papers page may be heading towards obsolecence, given that the Powers That Be in political science have joined forces to launch PoliticalScience.org.

Now, if they can only figure out how to make employers actually pay attention to the vitas posted on eJobs, this discipline might well be organized by the time I’m retired.

I planned to post about this Monday when I got my APSA April e-Newsletter, which helpfully arrived in my email box well after half the events it talks about have already happened, but when searching for my name turned up nothing (when I know for a fact there should be some of my stuff in there, at least if it includes—as advertised—papers from APSA 2003 and MPSA 2004), I concluded the site was useless as-is, being an egotistical snob and all.

Professor Bainbridge thinks some branches of government are more co-equal than others:

Reading the accounts of the Supreme Court’s oral argument yesterday on the Guantanamo prisoner appeal, I am struck yet again by the unweening arrogance of the US judiciary. Set aside the substantive merits of the case, of which I believe Justice Jackson’s aphorism “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” more than adequately disposes (see also my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh’s more substantive critique). Instead, consider how offended some members of the Court seemed to be by the notion that any aspect of American life might lie outside their reach. Breyer, for example, complained: “It seems rather contrary to an idea of a Constitution with three branches that the executive would be free to do whatever they want, whatever they want without a check.”

Apparently only the Supreme Court is “free to do whatever they want… without a check.” If five of the nine unelected old men and women on that court agree, they can strike down any law or executive action. And our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain them other than the impractical route of amending the Constitution.

In actuality, our elected representatives have a great deal of power to constrain the judiciary: they may, for example, limit its jurisdiction, expand its membership (“court packing”), reduce funding, split circuits, and take myriad other actions designed to frustrate the court. Lower court judges can, and often do, defy the clear precedent set forth by the Supreme Court. Congress and the president routinely ignore the intent of Supreme Court decisions like INS v. Chadha. The Supreme Court has no police power to compel compliance with its decisions; President Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Little Rock, not Earl Warren, while President Jackson gave the (figurative, if not literal) finger to the Court when it told him to stop deporting the Cherokees.

Heck, good money says that if the Supremes had done what almost all agree now is the right thing in Korematsu, and said Japanese-Americans were being deprived of their rights by being interred, it wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference. And, should the Court actually agree with the Gitmo detainees’ case, and if the hypothetical Reinhardt decision comes that some detainees should be released, I’m not expecting the administration to be in any hurry whatsoever to comply—more likely, they’ll just ship them off to the Mossad or something.

To assert that “our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain” the courts is borderline absurd. Congress and the president have plenty of power—they just choose not to exercise it, given that both parties want to have a Supreme Court that is willing and able to do the dirty work of standing up to the voters when they demand “uncommonly silly” laws (that nonetheless get overwhelming legislative support) like flag desecration acts, public morals legislation, and the like.

Update: Brett Marston agrees with me, at least in part, citing additional constraints on the Court (most notably, that it is restricted to ruling on cases on its docket).

While I was off doing better things, apparently some debate arose over whether or not the Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a, er, “chick.” (The hotness and the wearing of Abercrombie & Fitch were not debated.)

I really don’t know what to make of all this. I know better than to think that good-looking women can’t be smart though… and thus my gut feeling is to give Ms. Doerty the benefit of the doubt on actually being Ms. Doerty.

More wackiness from the Bay State gay marriage kerfuffle: now the plan is, remove the judges.

Link via Kate Malcolm.

“Public policy is a government plan of action to solve a social problem.”

“Public policy is a government plan of action intended to solve a societal problem.”

Three guesses which definition was in the textbook, and which was the one I put in my lecture notes. Bonus points if you can make the definition even more accurate by adding a single word.

Tyler Cowen links a New York Times piece on how researchers are using MRIs to look at how voters’ brains react to political ads, and it’s a pretty fascinating piece. Though I must quibble with this graf:

“These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages,” said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research. “They’ll help put a bit more science in political science.”

Dragging fancy machines into the room has nothing to do with whether or not you’re being scientific. Somehow people have this warped view that you can only do “science” when you’re dressed in a lab coat and goggles and there are a few bunsen burners in the room, which is simply not the case.

Sid Salter had a piece in Sunday’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger on the byzantine structure of Mississippi’s alcohol laws—so byzantine, in fact, that the state tax commission (or the paper) apparently doesn’t know that Lafayette County, with the exception of the city of Oxford, is dry, not wet.

Alex Knapp links a rather amusing parody site, which contains this rather incorrect view of American political development:

The American Democratic system works as well today as it did when the electoral structure was laid out by the founding fathers. In fact, Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams all ran as “Democratic-Republicans”, this party originating today’s Democratic and Republican parties. Not since Zachary Taylor in 1848 has the Electoral College voted a third-party (Whig, in this case) candidate into the White House.

That ain’t exactly how it happened. The “Democratic-Republicans” actually started out—even more confusingly—as the Francophile, agrarian “Republicans,” as in “not monarchists,” with the associated implication that the Federalists* (Anglophile, commercial, concentrated in New England) were. They then became the Democratic-Republicans and finally the Democrats circa 1828, well after the last gasp of the Federalists. Until the late 1850s, the primary opposition party were the Whigs, a party that lacked much of an ideology except, perhaps, being a tad less populist than the Democrats of the time.

The Republican Party, established circa 1854, had no real connection to the Democrats—beyond a membership of disaffected Whigs, Democrats, and assorted other parties who joined to support a fiercely abolitionist platform and the presidential candidacy of John Fremont in 1856.

Still, it’s a cute site…