It occurs to me I know far too much about gambling for someone who (a) never bets on sports [except I did participate in an NCAA tourney pool last year, at a cost of $10] and (b) has never lost (or won, for that matter) more than $100 gambling in a calendar year. What I get for having an innate interest in probability, I suppose.

Of particular interest to me, at least, was his characterization of Dutch politics—for much of the 1990s, the Labor Party (PvdA), in coalition with the free-market liberals (VVD) and the left-libertarian Democrats 66, could do no wrong, although even in the 1998 election there were signs of disaffection among Labor’s traditional supporters in the working class. Much of this, however, was overshadowed by the nearly simultaneous collapse of the country’s Christian Democrats. (One chapter of my dissertation examines how voters made their vote choices in that 1998 election.)

More to the point, from an academic point of view, Pieter’s piece demonstrates the value of a truly comparative approach to studying politics. Many—perhaps even most—scholars of American politics would never think to look to another country for insights into how American politics works. This tendency impoverishes both the study of American politics and studies of other countries—and often leads us to ghettoize research, to the point that we are often unsure how generalizable our theories are. Partly this is the fault of the largely artificial distinction between “American” and “comparative” politics in our discipline, where I’d argue the more meaningful distinction is between political behavior and institutional approaches, regardless of the context.