The soap opera that is Alabama’s football program continues in earnest; James Joyner at Outside the Beltway reports that the Mike Price era at Bama is over, after exactly zero games. James links to a Ivan Maisel ESPN.com piece recommending that the Crimson Tide hire ex-Bama player Sylvester Croom, who apparently is currently an assistant coach for the Green Bay Packers.

No matter what happens, I still look forward to watching the Tide’s defeat at the hands of the Rebels on October 18.

So says Jane Galt, anyway. Here’s what I posted in comments over there in response…

I’m afraid I’ll have to continue to disagree. Political science, like sociology and economics, is a science because it applies the scientific method (a.k.a. empiricism) to the study of politics.

The difference between political science and say physics isn’t so much the method as the measures; physicists have very good measures of the quantities they like to analyze (819,321 leptons here, 1.32121 angstroms there), while political scientists (and sociologists and psychologists and…) have to deal with things that are much harder to quantify. Economics does slightly better because (a) there’s a simplifying assumption that utility is money (which happens to work nicely for most people except monks and tree-huggers) and (b) money is very easy to quantify compared to “affect,” “ideology,” or “partisanship” (things that political scientists measure).

Now, there are people who study politics (and economic behavior and social groups) without the use of the scientific method. They aren’t scientists, and thankfully most of them have gotten it through their skulls that they aren’t and don’t pretend to be. (The question then is what do you do with the people who don’t study a social science using the scientific method, which becomes a thorny political issue.)

More broadly, I think you’re confusing generalizability with empiricism. Yes, sociologist X followed around a single drug dealer; yes Dick Fenno followed around Senator Y. But if enough sociologists follow around enough drug dealers we can test a theory about how drug dealers behave in general.

I’d find the whole discussion laughable if Jane (who usually I find rather thoughtful) weren’t so horribly misguided on what “science” is and isn’t.

Other reaction to Jane’s original post can be found at The Volokh Conspiracy, where Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner have comments. Also, I somehow forgot to link to Kieran Healy, who defends the honor of sociology.

Glenn Reynolds has a brief commentary and round-up of links to reactions to Bush’s speech and carrier landing. I have to say when I heard about the carrier landing, the first image that popped into my head was Mike Dukakis’ head poking out of the top of a tank, but it seems to have come off fairly well.

As for the speech itself: as a matter of personal sanity I try to avoid listening to Bush speeches, mainly so I don’t get the irresistible urge to pull an Elvis on my TV.

Dan Drezner passes on word that he’ll be guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy this weekend. Congrats!

In perhaps-unrelated news, nobody has ever asked (or, for that matter, been asked; perhaps I can only blame myself) to guest-blog at Signifying Nothing.

I don’t have lots to post about today, but Jane Galt has a followup on yesterday’s piece that I’m in broad agreement with, as well as a more polite version of my Krugman snakeoil post.

Henry Farrell has more. Just to clarify: most of my work is in mass political behavior, including political psychology, and what you’d call “institutional behavior,” so I don’t do much with economic theory per se. It’s not so much that I have an aversion to the material as it is an issue of it not being particularly applicable, although my dissertation does revolve around a Downsian take on how voters use and process information (straddling the line between political psychology and rational choice theory).

Jane Galt has a lengthy post in which she makes the following statement:

The humanities simply doesn’t have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can’t, although you can certainly be more rigorous than many of the programs devoted to exposing the obvious truth that Shakespeare and company did not have the same racial and gender sensibilities as 21st century Americans, yawn. In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it’s possible that you could, but don’t yet. That’s why discussions in those courses tend to revolve around the speakers’ opinions on human nature, interesting and possibly right but very difficult to either prove or falsify.

James Joyner took Jane to task for lumping political science in with the humanities, and in comments there the validity of political science as a science is being piled on by James and Steven Taylor. My comments at Jane’s place were a bit less temperate, but some of the other commenters got under my skin too; here’s what I said:

1. Yes, there is a giant pissing match in our discipline between the empiricists and the non-empiricists. Coupled with that is an internal war among the empiricists between the quals and the quants and the game theorists. But then again political science has really only existed as a separate discipline from history, sociology, psychology, and economics for about 50 years (despite the 100-year pedigree of the APSA), and it’s still trying to figure out what to do with those disparate heritages.

2. Not everybody plays with 2×2 contingency tables and single-variable explanations of political phenomena. We have this neat concept called “multiple regression” that can deal with more than one independent variable these days; we use that sometimes.

3. Explanation is more important than prediction in the long run. I’d rather have a wrong prediction than a wrong explanation. If we just wanted predictions, we’d do what insurance companies do: stick a bazillion independent variables in the model and stepwise-regress it. It’ll predict great to your original dataset but (a) will blow up if you apply it to anything else and (b) won’t make any sense anyway (“hey, it turns out people with purple cars and limps have more accidents than others”; yeah, so?). By contrast, I can tell you why almost 400 members of Congress voted for articles of impeachment and procedural motions leading up to it, and I did it with 9 independent variables—and some of the explanations would be quite surprising even to those who followed the public debate and talking heads.

4. There is no number 4.

5. I can build you a very simple probit model today that will predict how most voters will behave in the next congressional election, based on nothing other than their demographics. Heck, I already have; read this paper. It ain’t Galileo dropping stuff off the Tower of Pisa (apocryphal), but it’s pretty good for a then-2nd year grad student playing with a Heckman selection model (ok, not so simple) and 50-year-old theories of voter behavior.

Now, granted, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen running around pretending to have all the answers. Some of them (Larry Sabato *cough*) are in my discipline. Some of them (John Lott, Paul Krugman) are in more “respectable” ones. But just because some Ivy grad whose only exposure to The American Voter was that it happened to be on a bookshelf in someone’s office in his department can’t tell you who’ll win a local school board election doesn’t mean that nobody can.

For the record, no particular Ivy grad was being singled out above. I love all Ivy and non-Ivy grads.

I’ve finished up Foomatic-GUI 0.3; you can download it here. The main new feature in this release is that the XML parsing is now done using xml.sax instead of sgmllib, so it is much faster.

Also, I have uploaded this release to Debian unstable.

In a bid to avoid an impact fee on new development in Shelby County, the county’s politically-connected noble property development cum land speculation industry has come up with an alternative, according to Wednesday’s Memphis birdcage liner Commercial Appeal: a local 1% income payroll tax that allegedly would be deductable from property taxes by county residents.

No word in the article on how the county residents who don’t own their own property (a group that’s disproportionately African-American) would be completely screwed over get their income payroll tax back. Tuesday’s CA carried a longer piece that describes the blatantly unconstitutional scam idea in more detail, including the risible provocative assertion that renters will be able to credit their payroll tax against rent (or something, as it’s written in typical CA gobbledygook).

Particularly hard-hit by this monstrosity brilliant plan would be Shelby County residents who work in Mississippi, who not only will have to continue to pay Mississippi income tax but also will likely see their base property tax jacked up to compensate for the shell game redistribution of revenues.

Among the other loathsome brilliant ideas being considered by the scum of the county property developers is a poll tax that Maggie Thatcher would love per household fee for police services for county residents.

Why do I read How Appealing? For great paragraphs like this one:

The second case [decided by the Supreme Court on Tuesday] involved the question whether Congress could lawfully require aliens subject to deportation proceedings for having committed a crime to remain imprisoned pending the outcome of their removal proceedings. In the case under review, the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional to hold a lawful permanent resident awaiting the outcome of removal proceedings without the possibility of bail. Recognizing that a Ninth Circuit ruling was under review, the Supreme Court reversed, 5-4, in a decision that generated opinions totaling nearly 75-pages in length. Fortunately for me, those most interested in this ruling are in custody of the Attorney General and therefore won’t require an exhaustive rehearsal of the case here at “How Appealing.” For those readers who are aliens but are not yet in custody, my advice is don’t commit serious crimes. That goes for the rest of this blog’s readers, too. (And while you’re at it, don’t commit minor crimes, either. Why not take up blogging instead?)

Of course, to fully appreciate this paragraph, you have to recognize that the Ninth Circuit is by far the most-overturned appellate court in the nation. They apparently didn’t get the memo (I think it’s called the “Constitution,” by the way) about the Supreme Court being the principal and them being the agent.

Leave it to Jane Galt to explain, far better than I could, why I won’t be voting for any Democrats for federal office any time soon. Not that Mississippi Democrats are any better; they mostly combine the statist impulses of their federal brethren with a social conservatism apparently calculated to out-flank Pat Buchanan for the hearts and minds of voters. (In other words, it’s just like Huey Long, albeit 70 years later.)

Jane may have been inspired by this Daily Kos piece (which laughably describes the Democrats as “the party of personal liberty” — apparently, the only difference between me and Cynthia McKinney in Kos’s mind is that I like the NRA), or perhaps this Samizdata rebuttal, which includes in part this sensible summation of American politics circa 2003 (or, for that matter, circa 1938):

What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"… media control legislation described as "Fairness"… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of 'personal liberty issues' by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named 'Patriot Act' is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO’s The Corner posts an email that suggests that Mike’s Place, the bar bombed today in Tel Aviv, was a major hangout for both Americans and Israelis.

It seems that some Palestinians want the much-feared neo-con plan to come to fruition after all. My best guess is that Abu Mazen and Arafat have about one week to get serious about terrorism before W calls Ariel Sharon to tell him that the gloves can come off, and when that happens I wouldn’t want to be between the green line and the Jordan.

I have a (loose) May 15 deadline for writing a chapter of my dissertation; hence, bloggage will probably be limited to procrastination or break periods (i.e. not much more limited than it already is… but still, I’m giving a heads-up).

Well, if the whole law prof thing doesn’t work out for Eugene Volokh, he can always fall back on the lucrative career of being a local TV station’s consumer reporter. Next time on “Does It Work Blogday,” Eugene tests whether Tide Ultra with Bleach Alternative really gets your clothes whiter.

I tend to agree with Stephen Green’s take on the meaning of the appointment of Abu Mazen as Palestinian prime minister; on the one hand, there’s the concern that it’s all another Arafat shell game, but on the other it’s fairly clear that the intifada just ain’t working. The presence of over 200,000 U.S. personnel within a 400 mile radius of Ramallah may also have also had a strongly clarifying effect on the minds of the Palestinain Authority higher-ups—it probably doesn’t hurt that a lot of people have the (IMHO wrong) impression that there’s a cabal of bloodthirsty neocons in Washington just waiting for an excuse to wipe the PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas, and PIJ from the face of the earth.

I largely agree as well that the main problem isn’t so much the Palestinians as their enablers in the European Commission, most notably Chris “I used to be for the rule of law, but fuck it” Patten. If the EU can get its own house in order, I suspect the Palestinians, once faced with the full economic consequences of their leaders’ stupidity, will fall into line in short order.

Previously blogged here.

Ottawa’s ignoring one of Canada’s most important provinces, yet there’s not much of a succession movement there, at least not yet. More on Alberta’s perpetual screwing by Her Majesty’s Government is at Colby Cosh’s place, which links to this rather interesting article in The Hill Times (Roll Call à la Canadienne) by a Clinton-era diplomat from the U.S. to Canada. Here’s just a sampling:

From a U.S. perspective, one puzzles over the durability of Canadian unity in the West, and more specifically its attraction for Alberta. A Canadian political maxim has emphasized the patriotic commitment of Western Canadians to Canada, but it appears to be more based in residual sentiment of history than in 21st century logic. Just what is in it for Alberta? What does “Canada” supply that Alberta does not already have or could not supply for itself?

And how do Alberta’s elected leaders get treated by Ottawa?

In Ralph Klein, Ottawa has the most Canada-centric premier Alberta is ever likely to elect. And Ottawa treats him as if he is some inebriated oaf with oil-stained jeans.

The root of the problem?

As long as the Canadian political structure provides only for “rep by pop,” the West would have to have population levels equivalent to Ontario and Quebec to modify the current socio-economic agenda. If, as some Liberals have tongue-in-cheek suggested, Alberta should elect more Liberals, it would still be meaningless. Alberta’s delegation could be 100 per cent Liberals—and still its interests would take a back seat to those of Ontario and Quebec.

I suspect there’s a lesson in here for those Americans who want to abolish the Senate and get rid of the Electoral College. I’ll leave figuring that out as an exercise for the reader.

Jacob Levy at The Volokh Conspiracy has some excellent advice for those who don’t want the Supreme Court expanding the right of privacy. Quoth Jacob:

A note to those whose preferred-policy-position tracks Kurtz’s. If you’re worried about judicial slippery slopes, if you want to head off sweeping court decisions that accomplish too much and push too far, you should get out there and push for legislative repeal of the bad laws that invite such a judicial response. If Texas had repealed its sodomy statute, there’d be no Lawrence v Texas to be arguing about in the first place. Don’t merely passively “favor” such repeal, but do something about it—including arguing with your socially-more-conservative friends and allies about it. Some death penalty supporters have noticed this dynamic and have actively worked for important procedural reforms.

Of course, this wouldn’t be much help to guys like Rick Santorum who want to keep sodomy criminalized (and, despite some peoples’ efforts to wriggle some other meaning from his interview, Santorum fairly clearly stakes out a “sodomy ought to be illegal” position), but this point shouldn’t be lost the “moderates” who are running around defending him—like Kurtz and the other folks at NRO.

From the looks of things, the Alabama legislature doesn’t read The Volokh Conspiracy (link via How Appealing).

The new configuration page allows you to set the preferred stylesheet for this blog (this option used to be further down the page); you can also set the time zone for the blog’s contents to be displayed in.

A few shortcuts for common time zones: Eastern, Mountain, Pacific, GMT/BST, and Iraq. (Central is deliberately omitted, since it’s the default for this blog; if you’re in Indiana or Arizona, you’ll have to go and find your timezone yourself…)

I’ve already insulted Larry Sabato once in this blog, so why not do it again? Today he handicaps the Mississippi governor’s race for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger; let’s figure out what Larry thinks will happen:

... Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said he expects Bush to swing through all three Southern states as he builds a coalition for his re-election bid next year.

Sabato said he expects Bush to rally support for Barbour.

Ok, so Bush is going to help Barbour, right?

But if the president actively campaigns for Barbour, it could also help energize the opposition, [Sabato] said. ... “I can also see Bush campaigning for Barbour generating a large black turnout for Musgrove because of the black community’s dislike of Bush,” Sabato said.

Maybe not. But Sabato doesn’t think this will matter much:

Although the race for governor has barely made it out of the gate, Sabato gives Barbour the edge because of Mississippi voters’ natural inclination to vote Republican and the state budget troubles haunting Musgrove.

Good points all. But…

Still, he doesn’t discount Musgrove. “He’s the incumbent governor. He worked hard to get there, and he’ll work hard to keep it,” Sabato said.

Ok. So how is Barbour’s campaign going to affect down-ticket races (like mine)?

Both [University of South Mississippi political scientist Joseph] Parker and Sabato said Mississippi voters have idiosyncrasies that make it difficult to say with certainty that statewide Republican candidates could ride Bush’s coattails.

Bush carried the state in the 2000 presidential election, but most of the statewide elected officials in Mississippi are Democrats.

So maybe Mississippi voters have split-level partisanship… but maybe they don’t:

“That’s left over from the old days,” Sabato said. “Most Southern states had that kind of schizophrenic voter behavior. They would vote Republican for president because Democrats were liberal. Democratic nominees on the state level were more moderate. That (behavior) is changing over time.”

Front page in the Clarion-Ledger. Absolutely no story. Another article for Sabato’s clippings file… but completely unenlightening otherwise.

Finally, my dream ticket has arrived… screw Bush and $RANDOM_DEMOCRAT.

Alec Saunders has a roundup of links about a purported effort to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal (based on a story in the Australian).

Far be it from me to speak on administration policy. However, the Los Angeles Times report (that Alec also links to) almost buries another far more plausible explanation:

Energy Department officials vehemently denied that they are actually producing nuclear weapons and said they need the capability of producing plutonium parts to ensure the reliability of the existing stockpile of U.S. weapons, which is aging and may need new components.

By the time the new production facility is online—in 15 years—it is quite possible that considerable portions of the current nuclear deterrent force will be over 60 years old. Unlike Alec, I think it would be irresponsible for the government to have nuclear weapons that simply don’t work (or, worse, could accidentally detonate due to aging components), and I don’t think complete disarmament is a realistic alternative, particularly with both China and North Korea developing their arsenals and the likelihood of more nations going nuclear in the coming decade.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal takes a look at SPR 385, better known as Nonconnah Parkway or Bill Morris Parkway, in southeast Shelby County. Money quote:

“I call it the Bill Morris Super Speedway,” said Lt. Wayne Goudy, traffic commander for the Sheriff’s Department.

“When we go out there to write tickets, it’s not uncommon to get someone going over 100 mph.”

More on the Nonconnah here.

Tim Lambert has a Sunday update that links here. I agree with Tim that there were coding errors; however, as someone who’s worked with large CSTS data sets, it can be hard to get the coding right, particularly when you’re dealing with time-varying covariates (example: event X happened in 1991; do I change the dummy variable in 1991 or 1992?). One’s judgment of the maliciousness will probably depend on one’s overall assessment of Lott; I’m not going to go there.

The larger question: has Lott been discredited? I don’t know. Ayers and Donahue say yes, but the potential problems I identified with the econometrics apply both to them and Lott; without someone doing a proper analysis—dealing properly with missing data, justifying fixed effects (instead of using, for example, random effects or regional or state dummies), etc.—we just don’t know who is right. But again, someone who either (a) has tenure or (b) cares can do that—the topic’s too politicized for someone who doesn’t even have a Ph.D. yet, much less a job. I’ll just go with the default, Calvin Trillin response for now: it’s too soon to tell.

Tim Lambert has another post today arguing that there’s a systematic problem with Lott’s coding that favors his results; since I’ve not read Lott & Mustard (I have a copy of More Guns, Less Crime, but I never got past the first few pages and a skim of the tables due to other time constraints), I can’t speak to that, but it seems suspicious at first glance.

And, regretfully, picking and choosing one’s analyses is endemic to the social sciences; you present the models that work. Of course, if the model doesn’t work (at least in terms of the relationship you care about; who cares if the SOUTH dummy is significant or not), and you can’t fix it without doing fraudulent things with the data or the specification, then you’d better throw out your research or revise your hypotheses...

At the end of a blistering attack on Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times op-ed (and Krugman’s subsequent defenses of portions thereof), Donald Luskin says:

At the end of the day, what is most striking to me about this whole affair is what it says about the so-called “science” of economics, aside from what it says about Krugman. It shows that highly credentialed (but politically biased) economists can use their reputations as scientists to offer to the public egregious errors-cum-lies. And then they can defend themselves, when caught at it, by twisting the infinitely elastic theories of their “science” into whatever shape is required to justify the lie after the fact. In terms of its long-range impact on human well-being, the “science” of economics may well be the most dangerous fraud ever perpetrated.

John Lott’s critics have said much the same thing about his use of econometrics (via Tim Lambert).

Now, I’m not going to pronounce either way on these issues. But I will say that I’m glad my little corner of academe has absolutely no bearing on the real world, Perestroika movement be damned.

Ok, it’s a slight exaggeration. But nobody’s going to be arguing the merits of a federal tax plan or the Second Amendment or anything else that’s particularly important based on my research, at least until I have tenure. And at least they’re economists… I don’t have to claim them as my own.

Holy Mini-Instalanche, Batman!

Apparently inspired by CalPundit’s idea to “out” anti-gay Republicans, Matthew Yglesias is speculating on the prospects of a right-to-privacy bill or amendment. Matthew speculates on why such an amendment has not been proposed in the past:

The existence (and scope) of a right to privacy in the constitution is a matter of some controversy, and proposing a constitutional privacy amendment might be seen as an admission on the part of privacy advocates that such a right does not exist in the un-amended constitution.

This argument goes back to the days of the Federalist Papers; one of the reasons why the Constitution didn’t originally include a Bill of Rights was the fear that enumerating rights would imply that those not enumerated did not exist (this is the reason the 9th Amendment was added to the Constitution, as part of the compromise Bill of Rights that the Federalists proposed to get the Constitution ratified—Radley Balko gives the expanded explanation here), based on the understanding that Congress’s enumerated powers were narrowly-drawn. Alexander Hamilton makes this argument in Federalist 84:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights.

James Madison, who did support a Bill of Rights in some form, makes a similar point in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, again couching it terms of limited federal powers and a fear that enumerating liberties might encourage them to be curtailed.

Having said all that, in the 215 years since the Constitution was ratified, the interpretation of Congress’s enumerated powers has greatly expanded. Unless you’re a liberal who subscribes to Lopez (a rare liberal indeed!), an enumerated powers argument in support of a right to privacy isn’t going to go anywhere—despite the fact that, at least when discussing the federal government (and state governments whose constitutions also enumerate the powers of their legislatures, a field I am admittedly inexpert on), it’s arguably the most powerful one. So necessarily the protection of unenumerated rights rests solely on the 9th Amendment, which leads to the need to enumerate them to protect them from infringement by judicial or legislative fiat unencumbered by any recognition of limited power.

My view: since both parties have basically abandoned the principle of limited government, as a practical matter a RTP amendment probably wouldn’t be a bad thing in this day and age, as the 9th is a very shaky foundation to found fundamental freedoms, including some conception of a right to personal privacy, on. However, I’m not quite ready to abandon that principle myself, so from a philosophical standpoint a privacy amendment would likely be another nail in the coffin of the 9th.

Edited add a link to Radley’s 9th Amendment discussion, which I read and linked a day or two ago (a similar discussion been a part of my 101 lecture on the Constitution for a few years); Jeremy Scharlack has a good roundup of links on the 9th too. More Santorum discussion in the Santorarium.

The phenomenon of “fisking” has obviously reached the mainstream: it’s been employed successfully on page A8 of today’s edition of The Globe and Mail. The fisk-ee? None other than Toronto mayor Mel Lastman, apparently upset about Toronto’s role as the North American SARS capital.

That—in an interview with CNN’s bumbling Aaron Brown, perhaps better known as “ratings poison” or “the poor man’s Charlie Rose,” no less—Lastman came out the lesser is yet another strike against this walking argument against municipal consolidation (and for the Peter Principle).

Via Alec Saunders.