Matthew Shugart reminds readers of tomorrow’s referendum in Ontario on adopting a mixed-member proportional electoral system to replace its existing purely constituency-based plurality system. If nothing else, it’s auspicious since this term I’m indulging my semi-closeted comparativist in my Introduction to Politics course—with the main theme considering representation and voting systems. Now, if only we were on the right chapter of Electoral Systems, although the chapter on plurality systems—where we are now—does talk a bit about electoral reforms: most notably, Labour’s long-promised but never-delivered referendum on electoral reform in Britain, dating back to 1997.

Quoth Megan McArdle:

John Quiggin asks why Americans vote on a Tuesday.

Louisianans apparently vote on Saturdays, at least in state elections. Indeed, the only elections in Louisiana that are held on a weekday are federal general elections, which are on Tuesdays pursuant to federal law. (Yes, this means working at the polls this fall means I will miss seeing two football games, alas.)

So, all Americans don’t vote on Tuesdays—indeed, the modal American doesn’t vote at all in most elections. Or maybe Louisianans aren’t real Americans.

The sample ballot for my precinct next month’s state primary is giving me a headache… and I study this stuff for a living.

An item potentially of interest to SN readers: I blogged earlier today about the recent federal court ruling ordering Mississippi to limit its primaries to registered party identifiers at OTB.

This post by Richard Vedder about Elon University’s choice to assign the book version of the movie version of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth makes what at first blush might be an eminently sensible point:

Universities who want to promote truth should select middle-of-the-road objective accounts (Steve names one or two). Or, if the goal is to invite debate on the issues, why not assign both Gore’s book and Chris Horner’s? Or some of Steve’s own work on the issue?

I think the answer here is twofold: first, Gore’s book (or at least the movie) is in the news, which creates an incentive to read it that would not exist for “middle-of-the-road objective accounts” even on the same topic—the dirty little secret of “summer reading assignments” is that I doubt 10% of students actually complete them outside the most elite institutions. And second, part of being a good student is developing critical thinking skills; the purpose of asking students to read the book is not to impose politically correct thinking on them, nor is it to have students uncritically accept the entire work. If Gore’s book is “weak on fact and objectivity,” surely college students can be expected to find those weaknesses and judge for themselves whether or not those faults undermine Gore’s argument. That is the core of what a liberal arts education is all about.

The standard “I have applied for jobs at Elon and might do so in the future” disclaimer applies.

When six key staffers resign from your campaign in one day, you might be in trouble.

For my political scientist reader who thinks the DH rule is an abomination: Chris Zorn and Jeff Gill on partsianship and support for the designated hitter rule in baseball. Mind you, I can’t tell if their extended literature review is intended to be taken seriously or is a parody; the following sentence suggests the latter:

By allowing pitchers to avoid hitting, and some batters to avoid fielding, the DH rule is suggestive of a larger-scale decline in the culture of personal responsibility in America over the past several decades.

I look forward to similar contributions on Americans’ attitudes towards soccer and the relationship between individuals’ attitudes toward foreign aid and interest in hockey.

þ: Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell.

Via Prof. Shugart: play the Redistricting Game. I smell an Intro to Politics assignment for the fall…

If you believe Billy Hollis, not much, although his practical positions on trade and immigration policy might appeal to some trade unionist elements of the Democratic coalition.

Part II in the Ron Paul series.

Hit and Run links a New Republic profile of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, popular with the right’s equivalent of the Netroots but apparently not attracting as many fans from libertarian ranks. Michael Crowley explains why:

But libertarians are a fractious bunch, and some hardcore activists have mixed feelings about the man now carrying their banner. For instance, libertarian purists generally support a laissez-faire government attitude toward abortion and gay marriage, as well as “open border” immigration policies and unfettered free trade. Yet Paul opposes gay marriage, believes states should outlaw abortion, decries high immigration rates, and has called himself “sort of” a protectionist. (These divergences may be explained by Paul’s socially conservative East Texas district, which lies adjacent to Tom DeLay’s former district and which President Bush last carried with 67 percent of the vote. Being pro-choice simply doesn’t fly there.)

As a result, Paul’s candidacy leaves some of his erstwhile libertarian fans cold—particularly the intellectuals who congregate in Washington outfits like the CATO Institute or Reason magazine. “He comes from a more right-wing populist approach,” explains Brian Doherty, a California-based Reason editor and author of Radicals for Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement. “Culturally, he strikes a lot of the more cosmopolitan libertarians as a yokel.” (Doherty himself is a Paul admirer.)

And, while some libertarians criticize Paul from the left on social issues, others are swiping at him from the right over the war. “Will Libertarianism Survive Ron Paul?” asked one article on the America’s Future Foundation website, before continuing, “Paul’s prominence threatens to make his blame-America instincts the defining characteristic of libertarianism in the public imagination. If libertarianism becomes inextricably associated with radical pacifism, will young people with classically liberal instincts be discouraged from serious political engagement?”

The question facing this libertarian-minded voter who’s likely to vote in the GOP presidential primary: if I wasn’t inclined to vote for Pat Buchanan, why would I vote for Ron Paul, given that on almost all the issues that matter their positions are virtually indistinguishable?

Probably the most prominent feature of the past 30–40 years of American politics has been the near-simultaneous rise in party unity in the House and the evolution of aggressive majority-party control of the chamber.

To wit, the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi are behaving more-or-less identically with the Republicans under Newt Gingrich. John J. Pitney, Jr., chronicles the “old-boss, same-boss” dynamic here, with special demerits for Pelosi’s would-be right-hand-man, Jim John Murtha, who was given a pass on violating House rules on decorum after threatening retribution against a GOP lawmaker who proposed stripping funding from a pork project in Murtha’s constituency.

That isn’t to say that the majority party controls everything, even in the House; the bipartisan backers of bringing home the bacon appear to be behind this move to relocate pork-stuffing to conference committees, which will immunize pork provisions from being amended out of legislation. The Porkbusters Weenies™ are nervous, but as a political scientist, I’m just surprised it took the House that long to decide to lard up appropriations in conference.

Those big brawls in the Taiwanese parliament? As fake as Jan Levinson’s new breasts.

þ: Battlepanda, who suspected it all along.

Apparently there was a debate among the Republican contenders for the presidential nomination tonight.

If more states keep following Florida’s lead, we may soon thankfully reach a point at which a state sets its primary date to be before the present time, the nomination will be decided (since the primary will have already taken place), and this whole process will be mercifully over. Or maybe I just watch too much science fiction where this sort of causality is commonplace (like this episode of Futurama).

Jason Kuznicki earns quote of the day honors for this statement; but, you should go read the whole thing:

[T]he state enforcement of private moral conduct almost inevitably produces an even greater moral evil than the conduct we aim to repress. Far from leading to a more moral society, the use of force to police the private conduct of adults achieves just the opposite; in the name of opposing libertinism, the prohibitionists run squarely into something far worse.

I was wondering out loud in my Congress class Friday when the Democratic leadership and the president would get around to actually hammering out a supplemental instead of the kabuki theater approach that seems to have prevailed in D.C. until this point.

Radley Balko takes note of my hometown’s inability to convince a Missouri Court of Appeals panel that an area of downtown Clayton is ‘blighted’. Quoth Balko:

The idea that expensive office buildings there could be “blighted” is laughable.

Indeed; the corner of Hanley and Forsyth is pretty close to the least blighted area in the St. Louis MSA by any plausible definition of the term.

Paul Gronke and Free Exchange both address how the use of a majority-runoff system in French presidential elections has produced in 2007 a runoff without the presumptive Condorcet winner on the ballot; neither is inaccessible enough to bring the good Marquis in by name, but Free Exchange mentions Ken Arrow and Paul Gronke discusses Gary Cox, which are certainly good starts in that direction.

So, I have this job interview… and the university in question decides to use a car service instead of having a department member shuttle me to/from the airport, which a perfectly rational decision on their part—and probably better for candidates’ sanity anyway, but nobody asked us what we think of being interrogated by a search committee member just minutes after enduring airline hell. But I digress.

Anyway, I arrive at the airport and get in the guy’s van, and I get to spend an hour listening to the guy’s treatise on the global monetary system (his issues with debasing the currency, fiat money, the whole nine yards). He drops me off and I go on my merry way. Same guy picks me up after the interview and, in the course of the airport journey, asks me if I’ve thought about 2008 and I try to steer the conversation to about the driest, most academic discussion of front-loading known to man. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work—and at this point, the driver tells me in no uncertain terms that the only candidate for 2008 who’s a “real American” is Ron Paul (his distinct lack of popularity—like the low prices of gold and silver the previous day—being attributed to The Man keeping him down).

A textbook called Looking at Movies mysteriously arrived for me today. I say “mysteriously” because I don’t teach any classes that have anything to do with film, although I’ve always wanted to teach a course on depictions of politics in the mass media—not a “politics of film” course per se, more a course looking at how the political system is portrayed in a variety of movie and TV genres.

Certainly one segment would be on speculative fiction, wherein most political systems shown are implausible or ridiculous (the new Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 being far less absurd than most). It’s a shame there’s no movie of Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, for its “Jefferson Mark-3 Constitution” would be worth some serious mockery, although I suppose wags might say after the 2004 election that any two randomly-selected Americans would have made better candidates than the two foisted upon us by the GOP and Democrats.

Here’s how I voted for Debian project leader:

[ 3 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 3 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 3 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 3 ] Choice 6: Raphaël Hertzog
[ 2 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 4 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above

For the uninitiated, Debian uses the Schulze method of vote counting (a Condorcet method) to decide its elections based on ranked ballots cast by Debian developers. In English, my preference order was McIntyre > Towns [the incumbent DPL] > (any other candidate) > (nobody).

Thankfully, another candidate withdrew from the election, saving me from having to cast a ballot ranking nobody ahead of a candidate for the second consecutive year.

DiA observes that Barack Obama may be taking the “all things to all people” schtick a little too far.

Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, whose response to Hurricane Katrina made fellow Peter Principle exemplars Ray Nagin and Mike Brown look positively competent by comparison, won’t be seeking a second term in the wake of polls that showed Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal wiping the floor with her in a potential November contest.

The smart money for the Democrats is on former senator John Breaux, last seen on K Street. Whether he can complete the Haley Barbour impression by successfully imitating Barbour’s transition from hobnobbing in Gucci Gulch to appealing to the Earl Hickey set remains to be seen.

James Joyner notes that the public opinion numbers on Congress have reverted back to their long-term average of 28% approval after a brief “100-hours” honeymoon where “approve” only trailed “disapprove” by a mere 18 points.

What may be more interesting is the dropoff among Democrats; their approval of Congress is already almost down to the last year’s lows among Republicans. I have a good hypothesis as to why that might be the case (my guess is that Republican identifiers tend to have lower expectations of Congress, and therefore rate it more highly than Democrats, when you control for who’s in the majority party), but no real time to spend on the analysis to demonstrate it, or for that matter the journal search to find out if it's already been done.

Jane Galt nails twenty-five theses to the wall; the whole exercise serves as a useful reminder to me of why I don’t bother to blog much about politics these days.

The Economist notes speculation that the Bush administration is inching towards a whole-hearted embrace of Kyotoism, and makes a keen observation via à vis motives:

[T]he White House was running out of options for making government even bigger.

Well, there’s still Hillarycare Part Deux, but I’d imagine that’s around the corner too.