Dan Drezner has expanded his site. Meanwhile, since I’ve publicized it for the eJobs placement service anyway, you can read my vita too. (Any emailed recommendations for beefing up or otherwise enhancing my vita would be greatly appreciated.)

John Lemon has sparked an interesting discussion at Kevin Drum’s site about whether or not conservatives are discriminated against in academia. My two cents, from my end of the universe:

1. I’ve seen surveys of political scientists, and their political beliefs as a whole are decidedly left-wing. (One such survey was made available at the 2003 MPSA convention, but I can’t seem to find a copy online.)
2. There are relatively few self-identified conservatives in political science. I know one self-identified Republican, and he considers himself a liberal Republican—and he’s a Ph.D. student. There are probably a larger pool of either independent or libertarian-leaners in the academy, including my dissertation chair, but to my knowledge none of them have described themselves as Republicans either. I do know a few other students who have expressed sympathies that are consistent with conservatism.
3. Conservatives and Republicans routinely receive abuse that, if directed at women or racial or ethnic minorities would be grounds for an EEOC lawsuit on the basis of a “hostile work environment.” For example, I have never heard a positive word about George Bush from anyone in a tenure-track job. In general the same goes for people with strong religious beliefs.
4. There are probably subfields in which this matters more than others. I suspect—but have no evidence—that more empirically-oriented research programs are more accepting of conservatives, since there is less scope for personal political beliefs in such scholarship. (Speaking for myself, in general what I study is fairly divorced from left-right debates, although there are implications in terms of what we can expect from democracy.)
5. I also suspect that this discrimination is less widespread the higher up the “prestige ladder” one goes in the discipline. I would be surprised if Ohio State, Rochester or Michigan denied someone tenure on the basis of their political beliefs, but I wouldn’t put it past Podunk State University.

What does this add up to? I’m not sure. But I’d be inclined to believe Lemon’s account.

Serendipity: Matthew Stinson at A Fearful Symmetry has some observations from a Florida State (not to be confused with Podunk State) perspective. And, the MinuteMan has more too…

Acidman thinks the design of Signifying Nothing is too busy. But at least I don’t have any photos of me—or Brock—shirtless on the front page…

Pejman passes on news that one of the Ivys (specifically, Cornell University) has offered professional race-baiter and ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney a guest lecturer’s position. $20 says it’s teaching “political science” courses.

Southern Appeal has dug up the press release, with the additionally-exciting news that none other than John “I idolize Robert Fisk” Pilger will also be receiving a guest professorship at Cornell. Ah well, at least I don’t have to disown that university.

A number of people, including a healthy chunk on the right (most notably political commentator and Washington Post columnist George Will), don’t particularly care for the California recall election, considering it (variously) anti-democratic, unfair, or inconsistent with the will of the Founders. (Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has rescinded his previous opposition in this particular instance due to Gray Davis’ general pissiness.)

The last point is fairly easily dealt with; unlike in gubernatorial elections, the president is indirectly elected via the Electoral College. The Electoral College was originally designed as sort of a half-way house between parliamentary democracy and direct election: like in a parliamentary system, the executive (in the parliamentary case, usually the prime minister) would be indirectly elected by the electorate. However, the Electoral College only does two things—electing the president and vice president—and then they go home; in a parliamentary system, the same body remains in office to approve, amend, or reject legislation proposed by the executive, and possibly—eventually—to remove the executive from office if it no longer reflects the preferences of the legislature. This removal, common to all parliamentary systems, is known as a vote of no confidence; if it succeeds, the executive must resign and be replaced, or new elections for a new legislature (and thence a new executive) are called.

The vote of no confidence is one way in which proponents of parliamentary democracy believe it leads to more stable government (the mirror image of no confidence is the power of the executive to dissolve parliament and call for new elections). So, how would we bring this benefit into a presidential system* without undermining the separation of powers? Obviously, a traditional vote of no confidence is out, as it would allow the legislature to remove the executive at will, and allowing the executive to dissolve the legislature would have similar problems.

The obvious solution is to allow the people who elected the executive and the legislature a “vote of no confidence” of their own. And, essentially, this is what the recall is: it allows the electorate to remove an executive or member of the legislature who is no longer acting consistently with their preferences. Since there is no continuous assembly of the electorate, and we don’t schedule election days on a regular basis with no expectation of some election taking place, the recall petition procedure allows the electorate to schedule a recall election if one is needed. And, since presidential systems don’t work well when there is no executive, there is a simultaneous election of a replacement executive (in parliamentary terms, it is a constructive vote of no-confidence). This system allows the electorate to work around deadlock between the legislature and executive, while at the same time not hurting the formal separation of powers between the executive and legislature (which would be a problem if we gave similar powers to either branch).

Perhaps most importantly, though, the recall provision substantially mitigates the problem of “lame duck” politicians who are subject to term limits. While the empirical evidence of “shirking” is decidedly mixed, the threat of a recall election may motivate term-limited single-minded seekers of reelection to behave more consistently with the preferences of the people who elected them, which is surely an outcome favored by proponents of the “delegate” model of representative democracy (as opposed to the Burkean “trustee” model).

To be sure, there is some fiddling at the margins that may be worthwhile. Some have suggested that the signature requirement for both setting a recall election and qualification for the ballot is too low, although at least in the former case it seems like getting a million registered voters to actually sign a petition is a rather daunting task to begin with; few, if any, organized interests in the state can claim that many members. And it might be reasonable to require some sort of run-off if the plurality winner doesn’t have a clear margin above the second-placed challenger (majority runoff is one possibility, but a threshold of 45% has also been suggested in the political science literature, and Shugart and Carey suggest the use of what they describe as the “double-complement rule” in Presidents and Assemblies), or to use an alternate balloting system like approval or Condorcet voting. But generally speaking, the recall provision is sound and there is no good reason why it should not be adopted elsewhere—it’s one of the few “progressivist” reforms that actually is good for democracy.

Want to know how bad SoBig.F is? Check out the mail statistics for our department’s web server (relativity)—if you can get through, that is. We’re averaging about one SoBig message every five minutes, on a system with around 30 active user accounts. By contrast, the campus email server (sunset) has about 10,000 user accounts—you do the math. The net result: a swamped commercial link.

Thankfully it looks like the university has managed to cut off the on-campus offenders, but off-campus is a whole other story…

James at OTB lets it rip, with some extra-special goodness for fans of America’s Team.

The final showdown of the 2003 World Series of Poker is going to be shown tonight next Tuesday (August 26) on ESPN (9 Eastern/6 Pacific); although the WSOP is already over—I saw the winner on Letterman several months ago—it’s still fascinating to watch, to the point I actually scheduled my social calendar in Ann Arbor around the weekly airings of a day’s action consolidated into an hour. I haven’t played poker in years, and when I did it was five-card draw, rather than Texas Hold‘Em (a seven-card variant with five community cards and two hole cards).

James at The Dead Parrot Society is also fascinated by the competition in high-stakes poker. And unlike James, I think letting the viewers in on the hole cards gives an added dimension to viewing and understanding the game—not to mention realizing just how often bluffing is an effective strategy, as many players don’t reveal that they were bluffing when they win.

Dan Weintraub at California Insider has an interesting post breaking down the numbers in the California recall race. If the polling holds up, the plurality winner may get at least 40% of the vote—not bad for a ballot with 134 other names on it.

In somewhat related news that doesn’t justify its own post, in the library today I picked up some light reading: Sampling of Populations: Methods and Applications by Paul S. Levy and Stanley Lemeshow. Disturbingly, it has (almost) nothing to do with my dissertation. I think that just proves I’m a total geek.

I’m back in Oxford after putting 830 more miles on the car, and the blog’s back online. The culprit: a power outage that led to a reboot into an apparently-broken kernel. So much for complaining about BellSouth FastAccess…

While we were sleeping:

• Daniel Drezner got himself a spiffy new Movable Type blog.
• Matthew revealed his surname to the world.
• Joy Larkin got Slashdotted and demonstrated all the cute women aren’t taken (at least, not yet; no word on how many marriage proposals she received).
• A bunch of Windows machines got smacked-down by a nasty virus. (What else is new?)
• A nice big chunk of the country and the most populous parts of Ontario got to enjoy a power outage due to grid failure. Everyone’s traditional enemy of choice (in Ann Arbor, it was fairly evenly split between the Canadians and Ohioans) was blamed repeatedly.

Coming soon from me: why recalls are A-OK by me (despite my general distaste for the initiative power), who has replaced political parties in translating aggregate preferences into policy (and why Madison would like it), and probably a rant or two once my held mail shows up. I’m sure Brock will have plenty to say too. I’m glad we’re back and glad you’re back reading us!

Matthew eviscerates a George Monibot piece this morning that decries “Americanism” as a religion. And he supplies a necessary corrective to those on the American left who believe the anti-American EuroLeft shares their pathological hatred of George W. Bush, but otherwise likes America:

Now I realize that it is par for the course for American liberals, and Democrats in general, to assume that the international left only hates America because of George W. Bush, but Mr. Monbiot is refreshingly honest in his admission, through this and other writings, that he loathes not merely Bush and that “warmonger” Reagan but all American presidents. You see, the “cult of America” he desires to destroy began with George Washington.

Go Read The Whole Thing.

One minor quibble. To an extent they tolerated Clinton, mainly because he “knew the language” of the European anti-American elite due to all that time he was at Oxford not-inhaling, and thus told them what they wanted to hear (“Sure, we’ll sign Kyoto”; “Sure, we’ll support the ICC”; “Sure, we’ll do your dirty work for you in Bosnia/Kosovo/Macedonia”; “Sure, we’ll continue to pay a disproportionate share of the U.N. budget, and even pay some back-dues, just to be chummy”) even when he had absolutely no intention of following through on those commitments when he returned to the U.S. (see Kyoto and the ICC, both of which Clinton put exactly zero effort into promoting at home). After all, that’s what they expect from their own politicians (see Chirac, Jacques and Schröder, Gerhard, neither of whom have been particularly fastidious in adhering to their countries’ commitments to the EU under the Treaty of Amsterdam). And they became more sympathetic to Clinton after he got his 1998 high-tech lynching for being an uppity black (wait, I’m confusing him with Clarence Thomas), even though he started bombing different foreign countries on a near-daily basis during that period (not that I’m implying causality here). But Slick Willie was by far the exception to the rule in this regard.

Jacob Levy needs only 232 words to eviscerate Dick Gephardt, the Bush adminstration, and (by extension) the Teamsters, on the basis of their shared, idiotic trade policies.

However, I don’t share Jacob’s guarded optimism that the Gephardt endorsement will stop Bush from proposing yet more protectionist policies; not only are union voters often non-observant of the union endorsement (and thereby able to be wooed separately), there are also plenty of other interests in swing states that want additional protectionist measures: catfish farmers in Louisiana, timber workers in the Pacific Northwest, and midwestern agribusiness.

The seeming last gasp of Gephardt and his New Deal Democratic philosophy is overall a great thing for American politics, but the confluence of pork barrelling, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism at the heart of trade politics on both sides of the aisle remains.

Today’s game of compare and contrast for Signifying Nothing readers: compare this post at CalPundit with this post at Pejmanesque, which arrive at completely opposite conclusions based on the same day’s reports of administration actions vis à vis Iraq’s WMD programs.

Perceptual screens—they’re catching on!

Steven Taylor explains in plain English why America’s party system has essentially stayed a true two-party system, even though other countries with similar electoral systems (notably Britain and Canada) have accreted semi-successful minor parties as well. The secret: open primaries.

The basic goal in the primary is to convince voters not party elites, that you ought to be the party’s nominee. If there is sufficient support for your candidacy, you will get on the ballot. What could be more democratic (as in rule by the people) than that?

Works for me…

It’s Friday. I know you want to go out tonight and have some fun. Before you do that, take 10 minutes and read this, now. Key phrase to whet your appetite: “We’re talking about a coordinated network that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi government.”

Link via Josh Chafetz at OxBlog.

Matthew Yglesias has more, including news that at least one prominent Democrat has finally figured out that this whole Saudi thing might *gasp* be a real issue. (You know, unlike the “Bush lied because I disagree with his thought process” and the “Bush lied because he told us that the Iraq war would be hard in the SOTU but nobody was paying attention to those passages, so no fair” issues.)

My friend Scott Huffmon passed along by email a link to an article in the Middletown, N.Y. Times Herald-Record: Young Republican’s party plan crashes:

An aide to Orange County Executive Edward Diana is under fire after he and his friends invited some of the nation’s brightest Young Republicans to what was advertised as a booze-soaked sex bash in Boston.

The controversy surrounding Diana’s 24-year-old staff assistant, Karl Brabenec, started at the Young Republicans national convention July 11, when his friends distributed fliers “for lots of beer, liquor and sex” at a party dubbed, “Karlpalooza ‘03.”

Since then, copies of the incriminating invites have surfaced in Orange County, prompting cries of disgust from women’s groups, county legislators and fellow Republicans.

I guess I can see how a flier that called on young women to “wear as little clothing as possible” might be construed as offensive by some. Meanwhile, Brabanec supporter Laura Vance has come out swinging against Brabanec’s assailants:

A few, like Orange County Young Republican Treasurer Laura Vance, who called the Times Herald-Record and a WTBQ talk show yesterday, came to Brabenec’s defense. Vance said most of the criticism had come from political rivals, and she brushed off the Republican Women’s comments.

“They’re a bunch of old hags, and I’ll tell them that to their face,” Vance said. “I’m a woman, and I don’t feel offended. The party never even went on. It’s unfair to make a big deal of something back home that happened on someone’s vacation.”

By that logic, I guess Chrisapalooza ‘03 in Ann Arbor is on (woo-hoo!). It’s not like anyone back in Oxford could be offended by an evening of drunken debauchery taking place 700 miles away, right?

Then again, maybe in light of the Las Vegas “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign, maybe Vance isn’t too far off the mark.

As I noted here, placing issues of fundamental political debate in a society beyond the realm of ordinary politics is a monumentally stupid idea. That goes for economic and social rights like those proposed in the EU constitution, and it goes too for gay marriage, as Michael J. Totten points out.

(Michael is probably wrong about the political support for gay marriage in the public; CNN reported today steep declines in support for all sorts of “gay agenda” items in recent polls, perhaps as part of a post-Lawrence backlash. I suspect it will be 20-30 years before most Americans come to accept the idea of gay marriage, due to generational effects.)

I know why conservatives want to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, just as they wanted to amend the Constitution to permit Congress to ban flag desecration, and want to use an amendment to ban abortion. Fundamentally, conservatives don’t trust the Supreme Court to leave politically contested issues to the people’s representatives, and perhaps they are right in that regard. But tying the hands of future generations is not the right approach.

Instead, let me offer a simple statement as an amendment: “Nothing in this Constitution shall compel the United States or any state to recognize a marriage formed contrary to federal statutes, nor shall this Constitution require the recognition of any marriage not between one man and one woman.” If Congress decides in 2040 (or 2005, for that matter) that they want to do the right thing and repeal Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, such an amendment would permit that while stripping the Court of any means to legislate an alternative definition of marriage in the meantime.

Bobby A-G, subbing for Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas, tries to defuse the complaints about President Bush’s use of the word sin in reference to homosexuality.

One thing that has stuck with me since our family reunion in May was what one of my relatives-by-marriage* said about sin: in God’s eyes, all sin is equal, whether it’s murder, taking His name in vain, or telling a lie. (In some ways this resembles Orthodox Judiasm’s approach to Torah law; it’s all or nothing.)

One can legitimately debate whether or not homosexuality is objectively a sin, or whether it ought to be one. But in the belief systems of most Christian sects, it is considered one, the opinions of non-believers notwithstanding. I think Bush’s point was that the severity of the sin doesn’t matter, again because God doesn’t care about the severity (or even acknowledge it)—He only cares about the sin. And everyone sins. So those who would condemn gays for being sinful without condemning themselves too for their own sins would be hypocritical.

Of course, since Bush allegedly doesn’t nuance [sic], I may be reading far too much into this.

My friend Scott emails to note that there is one unpardonable sin: blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost, if your denomination swings that way).

Mark 3:29 But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation (King James Version)

Matthew 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. (King James Version)

This lapsed Methodist learns something new every day…

The AP reports that the proposed Senate energy bill includes provisions that double the use of ethanol in gasoline.

Advocates, like the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, claim that blended gasoline does not lower fuel efficiency in practice. Quoth the CRFA:

Studies with 10% ethanol-blended gasoline show that actual fuel efficiency is essentially identical to that of regular (ethanol free) gasoline. Yet ethanol contains less caloric energy than gasoline, which should, theoretically, result in poorer fuel efficiency. The discrepancy results from the greater efficiency with which ethanol-blended gasoline is burned during engine operation.

This advocacy site claims a 2% reduction in efficiency, but that it is “a small price to pay for a cleaner environment.”

On the other hand, some auto enthusiasts believe that ethanol lowers the fuel efficiency by ten percent or more (negating the savings on gasoline, and effectively increasing the cost to operate the vehicle per mile), although it does increase the octane rating of the gasoline. And anything that feeds more money to ArcherDanielsMidland (motto: “We keep the Sunday shows on the air.”) and our obscenely over-subsidized farming industry leaves me somewhat skeptical.

Jacob Levy and Matthew Yglesias have been having a discussion about taking attendance in class.

My general policy is not to take attendance, for a couple of reasons; one, it wastes time (particularly in a large class), and two (if you do the “pass around a sign-up sheet” method), it encourages petty fraud. However, in my intro class I do offer “virtually nobody showed up” extra credit a couple of times per semester (usually worth some small number of points toward the quiz average, generally only when attendance dips below 50%), and occasional announced quizzes. I have heard rumors of universities that have “swipe your ID” attendance systems for large lectures, but I’ve never witnessed one myself. My general philosophy is that if a student really doesn’t want to be sitting in my class, I don’t particularly care if he/she is there either. Call it mutual indifference. There is a strong positive correlation between attendance and grades even without a formal participation score, so I really don’t feel the need to compel attendance through grading policy.

I don’t take attendance at all in upper-level courses. I do keep mental track of the attendance record of students to help decide how lenient I want to be when they come begging for grade bumps, though. (Ole Miss doesn’t give plus or minus grades, except in the law school, so a few points can make a big difference in class grades.)

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry (via Michael J. Totten, where a good discussion continues in comments) notes the attempted war crimes prosecution being brought before the International Criminal Court (not to be confused with the International Court of Justice or the International House of Pancakes) by a group of Greek lawyers over the war in Iraq. The target? Not Saddam Hussein or any of his henchmen (you know, real war criminals). Instead, it’s Tony Blair.

As Michael writes:

Say what you will about the Iraq war. Say it wasn’t worth it if you must. Gripe about proceduralism if that’s what you care about most.

But liberating an enslaved people from a genocidal monster is not a crime against humanity. It put an end to crimes against humanity.

Placing bleeding-heart liberals like Tony Blair in the same moral category as Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot won’t garner a whit of sympathy from the United States for any court that might take such arguments seriously.

Meanwhile, Matthew is concerned that the court is just another forum for lefty whinging against Global Capitalism:

I don’t like the ICC for reasons like the scenario played out in the story above; as it stands now, too many leftists view international courts as just another protest venue. While some of them break storefront windows in Montreal, and others clash with police officers in Genoa, still others make themselves heard by issuing asinine charges of “crimes against humanity” against persons whose primary crime is disagreeing with the left-wing worldview. For them, the ICC is less a criminal court and more an International Illiberal Activities Committee, which begs the question, who are the McCarthyites now?

Now, the ICC statute (for all its faults) does have safeguards against gratuitous prosecutions, including allowing the U.N. Security Council a virtual veto over any prosecution by the ICC. And, as Kevin Drum points out in Michael’s comments, “If the fact that idiots can file lawsuits were enough to discredit a court, we’d be reduced to settling cases in the United States by peering at goat entrails.” (Of course, the fact idiots can file lawsuits has been one of the major arguments for “loser pays” and other tort reform proposals in the U.S.)

But, the safeguards have limits. If the ICC accepted a frivolous prosecution against a signatory state, and a U.N. Security Council member decided to veto a prosecution against one of its own citizens (for example, if Britain vetoed the Blair prosecution, or charges were brought against Jacques Chirac over France’s intervention in Cameroon and France decided to veto), people would legitimately be concerned about a “cover up.” So the bias of the court, and the Security Council, will be to pursue even the most frivolous prosecutions against Security Council members, so the court will retain the appearance of neutrality.

Perhaps the ICC will deny this particular prosecution on the grounds than U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized member states to take decisive action against Iraq. But if it does so, it risks undermining its credibility with its core constituency—the internationalist activists, like those who brought this prosecution, who genuinely believe that International Law (as decided solely by them; democracy be damned) can and will be made to justly govern nations.

When I went to open a bank account Tuesday here in Ann Arbor, a block of items on the giant contract in which you sign away your firstborn were described by the manager as being required by the PATRIOT Act. Specifically, it asked whether or not each account-holder was a U.S. citizen and for each account-holder to state their occupation (which, in my case, because the manager seemingly didn’t understand the term “teaching assistant,” became “teacher”). No proof of citizenship was required—in fact, they didn’t even ask me to prove that the SSN I gave was mine.

How exactly this procedure will prevent terrorism is something of a mystery to me.

The current conventional wisdom on the right side of the blogosphere is that the 28 pages (not to be confused with the 16 words) were classified as a political calculation to undermine the Saudis.

I don’t know what to think about this theory. On the one hand, it ascribes far more intelligence to the administration than its critics usually credit it with (so if this turns out to be the actual strategy, those critics will say it was all Karl Rove’s idea). On the other hand, I can’t think of a good domestic political reason to cover for the Saudis, since their support in the U.S. generally doesn’t extend beyond their bought-and-paid-for segments of the Washington establishment (so if this turns out to be a domestic politics thing, the president’s supporters will say it was all Karl Rove’s idea).

So, I honestly don’t know what’s going on. But regardless it’s fun to watch the Saudis twist in the wind.

Georgy Russell (Signifying Nothing’s preferred candidate for governor of California) asks today:

I continue to be misquoted, and to have my quotes taken out of context. What’s up with that?!

Amazingly enough, there is no record of Russell having been interviewed by Maureen Dowd.

In all seriousness, when I ran for Congress three years ago, one report described my beliefs as being pro-prostitution (despite nary a mention of prostitution by me). I guess that’s what I get for having a platform plank calling for the legalization of all forms of consensual sex among adults.

Meanwhile, James (whose site I use as a substitute for blogging about things myself, since he has a comparative advantage in such matters) has a post with info on a number of the non-famous candidates for governor.

Last Tuesday morning, high winds knocked out power to over 200,000 customers of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water. As of 10 a.m. today—a week after the storm—around a third of those customers still have no power.

It amazes me that nobody is talking about this in the blogosphere, or in the wider media, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it puts events in Iraq in perspective: if a few minutes of wind can knock out power for an entire county in the industrialized world, with it taking weeks to restore power to some customers, should we be surprised that it’s taking longer to get things sorted out in Iraq?

For another thing, when this happens due to hurricanes, ice storms, or tornados, crews come from utilities that are hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away to help. But not in Memphis for this situation. Where’s the help from Little Rock and Nashville, St. Louis and New Orleans? Seven people have died already, and more will probably die due to heat exhaustion (daytime temperatures uniformly exceed 90 degrees Farenheit, with very high humidity) and combustion-related accidents (carbon monoxide poisoning, fires, etc.).