Since arriving in Ann Arbor last week, I’ve had something of a curious reaction to the revelation that I have a job. The near-uniform reaction, after hearing the details of the position, is that it’s a “heavy” load—which, given that it’s three courses a semester (or “3–3,” in the lingo) and five* preparations over the year, I suppose is a fair assessment, although it’s something of a godsend compared to the 4–4s at complete backwaters (“Research support? That’s your desk.”) I interviewed for, and the load itself doesn’t account for the relatively small classes or the generally engaged undergraduate student body. It’s enough to put something of a damper on my enthusiasm for starting my job in the fall.

Now, it’s possible that these folks just aren’t attuned to the realities of the academic job market, or perhaps just don’t recognize that for many potential scholars, taking a job at a non-Ph.D.-granting institution is a necessity rather than a preference. But it’s also possible that they’re on to something; is it possible that several years’ training as a researcher and methodologist is pretty much wasted if most of what I do the rest of my career is teach “textbook” political science and bivariate regression to undergraduates? Should I really settle for teaching three classes a semester when I could go elsewhere and teach three courses a year, if the research expectations for tenure are such that I’d end up doing the same amount of work anyway, especially when you account for the lack of graduate assistants?

The decision may, in the end, be made for me—if this past year’s experience is any guide, serious research institutions aren’t exactly clamoring to hire graduates of lower-tier (or even middle-tier) Ph.D. programs. But I suppose it’s something I’ll have to bear in mind this fall.

Chip Taylor solicits comment from political scientists on last weekend’s New York Times Magazine piece on the efforts to create a Democratic-leaning interest group infrastructure to rival the similar arrangements on the right. He writes:

That made me think about the Reform Party. After Perot was done dabbling in presidential politics, the Reform Party infrastructure was left with no real leader or agenda. It did have state and local party officials across the country, ballot access in many states, and eligibility for at least one more round of public funding for its presidential candidate.

Consequently there was a struggle between Buchanan and his organization and (if memory serves) the Natural Law Party apparatus (such as it is was). Neither was exactly committed to the principles of the Reform Party (to the extent that they existed); they were after the political assets of the Reform Party organization.

Now, I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is anywhere near the empty shell the post-Perot Reform Party was. But it seems that to the extent it is composed of coalitions of disparate interest groups, it is more vulnerable to a “hostile takeover.”

I wrote about this topic late last year:

With the institutional power of American parties in rapid decline relative to both candidates and interest groups (witness George Soros’ large donation to MoveOn.org, rather than the Democrats), thanks to the incumbency advantage, widespread adoption of open primaries, and McCain-Feingold, it seems likely that the United States will see more of these fights for the heart and soul of the party, as candidates and interest groups try to gain control of the remaining institutional advantages of the major parties—their automatic access to the ballot and their “brand recognition.” Why build a third party from scratch when you can just hijack the Republicans or Democrats?

More broadly, I think American politics has moved away from the system of parties articulating voter preferences (articulated in part here by James Joyner) to a system in which interest groups are the primary vehicle for public influence of the political process—with electoral competition something of a vestigial sideshow, necessitated more by constitutional requirements and the need for some elected oversight of the bureaucracy than it is required for functioning representative government. I don’t know that the central thesis here is anything too original—go read Schattschneider or Dahl—but I think political actors have finally come to recognize this reality in a way that they didn’t before, prodded largely by the search for loopholes in campaign finance laws and continual weakening of the institutional position of political parties in the system.

I think Bryan Caplan has really stepped in one here:

Larry Bartels has gotten national attention for his work on Bush’s income tax cut, inheritance tax cut, and public opinion. (Here is the full article; here is the digest version; here is what Alex Tabarrok had to say about Bartels). Bartels’ main point is that public opinion verges on contradictory: the public believes that inequality has gone up, agrees that inequality is bad, agrees that the rich should pay more taxes, BUT still supports two tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

Bartels is right, although since I belong to the tiny minority of people who favors however much inequality the free market delivers, for once I have to celebrate the public’s folly.

What Bartels does not seem to realize, however, is that the contradiction he laments is only one of many. [emphasis added]

I suspect very strongly that Prof. Bartels does realize this, as he is one of the foremost experts on public opinion in American politics. Mind you, Caplan’s broader post is a nice primer on the contradictions in public opinion that political scientists have known about (and attempted to explain) since the 1960s—contradictions that Bartels, and any other political scientist studying public opinion, would be well aware of.

Tyler Cowen calls on Dan Drezner to self-assign p values to his fence-sitting. My gut feeling is that this approach would be ineffective; based on the cognitive psychology literature, I’d have to conclude that Dan is probably not the best judge of his own objective probabilities. Instead, I recommend employing content analysis of Dan’s posts to arrive at estimated p values at given points in time, or using a panel of raters, or some other more accurate technique.

Incidentally, the only p value I have a good handle on for myself is that p=1.00 that, on election night, I will be sitting with my undergraduate methods class at some venue with available libations making fun of Brokaw, Rather, and/or Jennings on the big-screen as they call (and uncall) states. Assuming the dean doesn’t put the kibosh on the short field trip, that is…

Here’s my lame-ass election prediction: Kerry wins. And you can take that to the bank. At least, you can take it to the bank that you took my “Dean will be the nominee and Osama (not to be confused with Obama) will get a woody” prediction to (I suspect the tellers there aren’t that bright).

Now if I can just buy the Kreskin outfit and crystal ball prop from the local magic supply store, I’ll have some real respect in this discipline.

The part of “Chris” in this post is being played by someone else. The opinions expressed in this post are not Chris’s, particularly if you are looking to hire a methodologist… in which case, Chris’s vita is linked over there to the right, so read it and skip the rest of this post, which will be of zero interest to you.

For the individual in the San Francisco Bay area from a Comcast IP who did a Google search on “Political Methodology ph.d placement rate”: abysmal, if you generalize from an n of one—but pretty good if you consider a visiting position and spending another year desperately avoiding a tenure-track job with a 4–4 load or worse “placement.” Suffice it to say anyone actively looking for a real methodologist who can publish and teach Ph.D. students (as opposed to an Americanist they can also dump undergrad methods on) isn’t going to be happy with me—never mind that that’s what I’ve been trained to do.

On the bright side, your chances are probably much better if you manage to attend a top 25 Ph.D. program. So polish up those GRE scores!

Chip Taylor notes the current congressional squabble over the distribution of highway trust fund money. He writes:

Of course, if every state got back exactly what its residents paid in, the main purpose of the federal tax and trust fund would be to allow the feds to dictate highway-related laws: drinking ages, BAC levels, open-container laws and the like. Come to think of it, that is likely the main purpose now.

Bingo.

Of course, now the sicko social scientist in me wants to construct an econometric model of state highway trust fund returns.

Ed Cone and OxBlogger David Adesnik are having a small tête-à-tête over Adesnik’s critique of a Onion piece entitled “American People Ruled Unfit to Govern.”†

Rather than wade into the animosity between Messrs. Cone and Adesnik, I think there’s an important corrective to be made to Adesnik’s unyielding “faith in the aggregate rationality of the American public.” Adesnik writes:

As I’ve explained before, the American public actually has a very strong record of rational decision-making:

Before the 1980s, it was taken for granted that the American public had volatile and incoherent opinions about politics, both foreign and domestic. By extension, this volatility and incoherence rendered Americans vulnerable to manipulation by both the media and the government.

In the 1980s, scholars began to discover that the premise of volatility and incoherence had led public opinion researchers to rely on methods that created an impression of volatility and incoherence even when there was none. In contrast, the United States had a rational public that derived its opinions on current events from a fixed set of values and updated its opinions when new information became available to it.

This conclusion reflects the research of America’s leading experts on public opinion, most importantly Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro.

I’m afraid Adesnik tells half the story; while a few of America’s leading experts on public opinion do agree on the existence of “aggregate rationality,” many others do not—including, ironically, the self-same Benjamin Page, whose more recent book Who Deliberates? argues that this aggregate rationality is skewed by the nature of public debate.

Perhaps the most promising effort to bolster the “responsible electorate” view is Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen’s work on affective intelligence, which largely rejects both aggregate rationality and the Michigan “normal vote” approach in favor of an explanation of politics based on emotional (or “affective”) reactions by voters.

That said, I generally agree with Adesnik’s view that the elitist perspective (captured by the Onion satire) of an American* public that is incompetent to manage its own affairs is inherently insulting; however, I’d argue that this is more the result of unrealistic expectations of a democratic public (fostered, ironically, in the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville, often viewed as keen observers of the common man) than it has to do with embittered elitism per se.

More of interest here.

Who would have thought that updating two syllabi for classes you’ve already taught before would take so long? Now, the fun part: writing a syllabus from scratch for constitutional law…

Eric Grey attempts to describe the rules for forming a minority government. There are a few points worth mentioning:

• The rules vary among parliamentary democracies. Some democracies, like Germany, require constructive votes of no confidence; in other words, to get rid of an existing government, you have to nominate a new one, which necessarily increases the stability of the system. In some other parliamentary democracies, the government falls if any government proposal is defeated on a party-line vote (i.e. not a “free” vote). Canada generally follows Westminster tradition, where “confidence” is a customary rather than a legal requirement; since only the Prime Minister (well, technically, the sovereign) can dissolve parliament and call elections, essentially this system is equivalent to the German system—although, since a government could only be replaced by a plurality vote, the PM is more likely than not to call new elections before such a vote could take place.
• Minority governments are somewhat more common than one might suspect. Notably, Israel’s government is currently a minority government. Britain and Canada each have had a few since World War II. Interestingly, minority governments are much more common than coalitions in countries with first-past-the-post (plurality) elections.

An interesting study of coalition government, by the way, is Multiparty Government by Michael Laver and Norman Schofield. Laver and Ken Shepsle’s Making and Breaking Governments is probably also worthwhile (from a more game-theoretic perspective, as is Shepsle’s bent), but, alas, I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’d appreciate recommendations on a scholarly text (or even a textbook) on Canadian politics, perhaps something comparable to Philip Norton’s The British Polity. For now, it’s just an idle scholarly interest, but maybe an employer one of these decades will be desperate enough to let me teach some comparative courses.

If you’re suitably wealthy (to the tune of $16.00), you may now invest in a printed copy of my dissertation. Of course, you can still download it for free, but this gives you the option of obtaining it in convenient book form—and, I might add, at a price significantly cheaper than that charged by UMI, while still funneling several bucks into my pocket.

Steve Verdon and I managed to scoop Matt Drudge on this working paper by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the bias of media outlets using the ADA scale. Where’s my gold star?

Meanwhile, James Joyner reacts to the paper itself. I agree that the method of using think-tank citations isn’t ideal, but I can’t come up with a better one offhand that allows you to put members of Congress and media outlets in the same measurement scale without a lot of a priori assumptions. (There are some other critiques at the Dead Parrot Society.)

Update: As Brock points out, Alex Tabarrok scooped us all. Story of my life.

Steve Verdon links a working paper (an updated version of which will be presented at APSA in September) by political scientists Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the partisan leanings of various media outlets on the basis of their reliance on think tanks for “neutral” information in straight-news stories. Estimated ADA scores for the think tanks are derived from their citations by politicians in the Congressional Record, which are then used to estimate ADA scores for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and the three broadcast network evening newscasts.

I’ve only skimmed the paper so far, but this seems like a fairly sound approach to the problem. As for the results… well, unless your name is Eric Alterman, I doubt you’ll be very surprised.

Jeff Jarvis asks:

Now it’s time that a social scientist or a pollster to measure the passion of our opinions—and an issue better come out pretty high on that passion scale before any reporter can say it’s deeply divisive.

Jon Krosnick at Ohio State (a social psychologist/political scientist) has published at least a half-dozen papers on attitude importance (e.g. “the passion of our opinions”) over the past 15 years. So, my suggestion to the pollsters would be: go forth and read Krosnick.

I’d also suggest that they go back and read Converse on attitudes and nonattitudes and “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” but I suspect they read—and forgot—such things long ago; they certainly don’t need me reminding them.

There’s a petition drive is underway in Colorado to allocate the state’s electors in proportion to candidates’ popular vote. All I can find is the title as it will be presented to voters; I can’t find the actual text of the proposal (including any minumum threshold requirement or whether there will be “bonus” electors for the plurality winner), so it’s hard to judge what the impact of the plan will be.

I suspect the substantive effect of such provisions, if adopted in every state, would be minimal across the board; while candidates might arguably be more inclined to focus on the most populous states, I’m not sure that the actual benefit of such a strategy would be very large. Instead, the sensible strategy would be to focus on states where you’re close (say within 100,000 votes) to gaining an additional elector, and it’s not at all apparent that these states would be more likely to be large.

At the individual level, I suspect PR for the electoral college would somewhat increase turnout in relatively lopsided states like Massachusetts and Mississippi, and somewhat decrease it in perennial “swing states” like Florida and Ohio, but I think that would have more to do with campaign effects than any sort of utility calculus by voters.

Incidentally, there’s probably a good undergraduate or first-year graduate student paper in an analysis of the effects of various electoral college allocation systems (PR, bonus PR, congressional district, plurality), with particular focus on elections with relatively large third-party voting (1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000).

More from Daniel Geffen, James Joyner, DavidNYC, and Jane Galt.

Will Baude:

Voting instrumentally (in presidential elections, at least) is quite irrational, except to the extent that voters enjoy doing it. The probability of any single voter changing the outcome of a presidential election is 0.

Tell that to a voter in Florida in 2000 (his probability was about .002, which isn’t great, but beats the heck out of the lottery). Because of the electoral college, the probability of any single voter changing the outcome of a presidential election varies from state to state, and is a function of the competitiveness of the election in that state. But you don’t have to believe me; instead, believe, er, Chris Lawrence:

For [supporters of third party candidates], the strategic/sincere choice rests on whether their vote is likely to be pivotal. Although Downs (1957) argues that casting a non-strategic vote is irrational, that is only the case if the vote has a non-negligible chance of affecting the outcome of the election. Sincere voting for minor candidates is irrational in the sense that elections are not normally thought of as a forum for expressing general preferences, but rather as a “selection process”; however, if political actors respond to election results as if they are referenda on particular policies espoused by candidates, sincere voting for minor candidates may be rational in certain circumstances. If a citizen’s vote is almost certainly not pivotal, it may be rational for voters to show their public policy preferences by supporting a minor candidate. ...

Thus, voters may be considered rational if they express a preference, rather than merely taking part in a “selection process,” in states where their vote is highly unlikely to make a difference in the outcome. For example, according to CNN (2000), only 20 of the 51 elections for electors in 2000 were in so-called “battleground” states that were expected to be close. Thus, a voter in one of the other 30 states or the District of Columbia could presumably vote for a third-party candidate and thus have virtually no expectation of affecting the presidential contest, as their vote would be highly unlikely to affect the disposition of their state’s electors. (103–04)

Unfortunately, the astounding finding that the variation in “pivotalness” of an individual’s vote varied in 2000 by a factor of nearly 1000 between the most competitive and least competitive state didn’t make it into then-Mr. Lawrence’s dissertation, although it has made it into at least one presentation of the findings of this chapter.

It’s not every day that you see a citation of The American Voter in The New York Times, but thanks to Nick Troester and Will Baude I stumbled upon David Brooks’ Sunday column on partisanship and rationality.

First, to settle the discussion between Messrs. Baude and Troester: Brooks’ analysis is essentially correct, although the transitory attachment voters would have with political parties under pure rationality wouldn’t be “party identification” (an affective—or emotional—orientation) as we conceive of it in American politics. Under pure rationality, voters would select among the platforms of the parties and vote for the party with the most desirable platform at that given moment, subject to the institutional rules governing vote choice (i.e. whether we are using plurality elections, proportional representation, majority-runoff, Condorcet voting, the alternate vote, or what-have-you, and the district magnitude).

Voting, I’d argue, has both expressive and (to borrow Baude’s term) instrumental aspects. One votes to both participate in the selection process—the way Downs conceived of voting—and to express preferences about how the government should act in the future. Much ink has been spilled over this debate over the past four decades (“proximity” versus “directional” voting, the rationality of turnout, etc.) and I need not recount it all here. Suffice it to say: voters aren’t rational in the Downsian sense (Page and Shapiro notwithstanding), people (to the extent they are rational) seek to maximize their expected utility, and Troester (despite his minor fault of not being an Americanist) is right—an outcome I attribute to Troester receiving a Michigan education, versus Baude’s Chicago one.*

On to Brooks, who shows he’s a little out of his field in his discussion:

Party affiliation even shapes people’s perceptions of reality. In 1960, Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, “The American Voter,” in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party’s approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it.

That observation has been criticized by some political scientists, who see voters as reasonably rational. But many political scientists are coming back to Campbell’s conclusion: people’s perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship.

I’ll grant that he’s working in newspaper space, but there are a couple of caveats:

1. I think he ascribes too much prescience to The American Voter on the role of perceptual screens or partsian filters. Most contemporary scholars would agree its psychological underpinnings are weak to nonexistent.
2. Political scientists aren’t “coming back” to their conclusions; with the exception of the aforementioned Page and Shapiro, the Michigan approach has been essentially the dominant paradigm in American political behavior since around 1980, and was certainly a leading contender since the mid-1960s.

Still, this is about the best explanation of contemporary thinking on American politics you’ll find in about 600 words, and it dovetails rather nicely with Ken Waight’s work at Lying in Ponds on elite political discourse.

To the rest of the world, “R and R” means “rest and relaxation.” To academics, however, it means “revise and resubmit”—a living hell of extra data collection, analysis, and writing.

Guess which version I’ll be doing this afternoon.

Professor Bainbridge roots for the Redskins to win one for a very idiosyncratic reason:

A 72-year streak links the victory or defeat of the Washington Redskins on the eve of election day with the presidential race. If the Redskins go down to defeat or tie, the sitting president’s party loses the White House. That leaves the fate of President Bush squarely on the shoulders of Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs. Hometown hero Gibbs, who led the team to three Super Bowl titles, retired after the 1992 season and now has returned to the team’s helm.

The Redskins face off against the Green Bay Packers at FedEx Field on Oct. 31 — the last game before the election Nov. 2. ...

The Redskins’ performance has aligned with the presidential outcome in the last 18 elections — a probability of 1 in 263.5 million, according to Dave Dolan, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Bainbridge at least acknowledges that this result “is a spurious correlation generated by data mining.” No such luck for someone else who should know better (quoted by Steven Jens):

From UVa poli-sci prof Larry Sabato comes word that no incumbent president with a four-letter last name has ever won (I’m avoiding using the term “re-elect” so as not to exclude Ford).

Sabato deserves his own personal category here at Signifying Nothing—particularly considering that I’m stuck with using his god-awful American government text in the fall. Even “Burns, Peltason, and 17 other dead people” would be better.

Amanda Butler laments the misclassification of The Federalist Papers as “fiction” at her local Books-A-Million store.

[Insert your own joke about companies headquartered in Alabama here.]

Russell Arben Fox gives some advance pub for the blogging roundtable organized by Dan Drezner at APSA in early September and ponders how the discussion will play out.

Of course, I’ll make a point of being there—assuming I end up going to APSA (I’m not presenting or anything, just going to play my designated role as meat for the job mill). I’m about 95% sure I will be there, but I should discuss it with the chair before upping that to 100%.

Anyway, it should be fun. Personally I’m curious how the panelists will reconcile blogs with the two-step flow of political information—is blogging expanding the access to be part of the elite or not, is it another avenue for transmission and diffusion of elite discourse, stuff like that. And it’d be nice to meet some more “scholar-bloggers” in person; as far as I know (for all I know, “John Lemon” could be in my department), Dan is the only one I’ve met in meatspace.

It’s just been confirmed that I’ll be teaching Constitutional Law in the fall—specifically, the first half of the typical political science “Institutional Relations / Rights and Liberties” sequence. Since I’m not a lawyer or an institutionalist, this leaves me a tad out of my depth; I’ve been on the receiving end of Rights and Liberties, but the rest of my background in law and the courts is in judicial behavior.

Assuming I use the case method (given that these are primarily law-school-bound students, I think I should stick with orthodoxy), I’ve got a couple of possible textbooks in mind: Mason and Stephenson (used by John Winkle at Ole Miss) or Rossum and Tarr. Since I’m not sure we plan to offer Rights and Liberties in the spring, and since I’m not sure that I’ll be teaching it even if we do, I’m leaning toward a single-volume text (which indicates Rossum and Tarr over Mason and Stephenson). I also thought of dragging out the first volume companion to the overweight West book I used as an wee grad student for Rights and Liberties, but it may be too expansive—and expensive—for a junior-level undergraduate seminar consisting primarily of political science majors and pre-law types.

Any suggestions, endorsements, or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I received a vote via email for Epstein and Walker, which has the advantage (IMHO) of having been written by political scientists.

Here’s a brief article on Quantian (a “live Linux” CD with lots of scientific and mathematical goodies on it) I’m working on with a fellow Debianista for submission to The Political Methodologist, our humble little organized section newsletter. Any comments or feedback would be appreciated.

The nice thing about being a lazy blogger is that if you want to fisk something, chances are someone else—in this case, Nick Troester—will have beaten you to it. But, lest I be accused of excessive laziness, allow me to pile on. The piece in Slate is called “Why We Hate Voting: And how to make it fun again,” by Thomas Geoghegan. Here’s a free hint: anyone who confuses civic duty with “fun” isn’t very normal to begin with. Shall we commence?

Usually, the outcome of a presidential election “depends on the turnout of the Democrats.” So says Nelson Polsby of the University of California-Berkeley. For once, I agree with a political scientist. I take Polsby to mean “Democrats” as a term of art for “most people.” By “Democrats” he means people with hourly jobs, high-school dropouts, high-school grads, single moms, single dads—anyone at or below the median household income.

But let’s narrow “Democrats” to people way down the income ladder, whose voting rate is usually less than 40 percent. Waitresses. Claims adjusters. College kids with loans. If the turnout among these people hits 50 percent, the Republicans are in trouble. Get it up to 60 percent, and Bush won’t even come close.

Actually, I think Dr. Polsby means “Democrats,” as in people who are predisposed to vote for Democratic candidates. In political science terms, we call these people “party identifiers”—they have a psychological attachment to their preferred political party. And we’ve called them party identifiers ever since 1960, when The American Voter came out.

I’ll grant that some earlier research, known as the Columbia school or sociological approach, argued that vote choice was largely a function of socioeconomic status, but The American Voter showed demography to be a rather distant causal influence on vote choice. Only African-Americans (a group oddly omitted from Geoghegan’s definition of “Democrats,” though perhaps this omission is understandable when you realize that he’s dealing with the limosine liberal set who read Slate) show the sort of bloc voting in American society that Geoghegan attributes to American social and economic groups. Union members and “blue-collar” workers, for example, are only weakly Democratic, as are singles, on the order of 60–40. And even then there can be significant cross-over effects; the “Reagan Democrats” were hardly a myth.

I know that the country’s turned to the right. But we’d still have the New Deal if voters were turning out at New Deal-type rates. (Between 1936 and 1968, voter turnout in presidential elections fell below 56 percent just once. Since 1968, it has never exceeded 56 percent.) So how can Democrats get the turnout of all eligibles up to 65 percent?

I doubt that seriously. One important causal factor Geoghegan omits is the lowering of the national voting age in 1970, which brought in a new cohort of voters who were unlikely to vote. Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that low apparent turnout in the U.S. is due to an increase in the non-eligible population (felons and non-citizens, which aren’t part of the “voting age population” used for redistricting) and the use of frequent elections (U.S. jurisdictions average at least one election per year, including local and state elections and primaries, while most other industrialized democracies only have elections, on average, every two years—and typically have elections for national office at different times from elections to local offices). The fact that the U.S. holds elections on weekdays rather than weekends is also an important factor in lowering turnout.

What are Geoghegan’s remedies?

First, offer two ballots, a long one and a short one. Let’s call the short one Fast Ballot. President. Congress. Governor if there’s a race on. That’s all. You’re done. Someone else will vote the long ballot.

Nick already explained what an idiotic idea this is. But in many states (including, I believe, Illinois), you can vote a party-line ballot just as easily. It seems more productive to encourage the adoption of (or return of) party-line boxes on ballots, then. (You can thank the Progressives for getting rid of party-line voting in many states.)

His second remedy apparently revolves around making the entire election process an excuse to go on a bender. No, I’m serious:

One free drink. Let’s take the 10 biggest population centers. In each one, set up a business-type council, full of media types and celebrities, to push voting. In September and October, have them sign up bars and restaurants to put up a red-white-and-blue logo on Election Night. What does the logo mean? With your ballot stub, first drink is on the house. Soon everybody will want to have a logo, the way in the New Deal, businesses showcased the Blue Eagle. Put the word out on college campuses. Get them to compete to throw the biggest party. Pump it up, the way we’ve done with Halloween.

No doubt, the Progressives are rolling over in their graves at this idea (you can thank them, too, for laws that require bars and liquor stores to be closed on Election Day in some states). In most (all?) states, it’s illegal to offer an inducement for voting—even if that inducement is given without regard to vote choice. From a theoretical point of view, I don’t think such laws are worthwhile—in fact, I actually wrote a paper on Philippine politics once that argued (in part) that citizens ought to have the right to sell their vote to the highest bidder. Regardless, this proposal is simultaneously idiotic and impractical (and illegal, to boot; not that that’s ever stopped any campaign tactic in the past, mind you).

Furthermore, the premise that any of this will help the Democrats is, simply put, absurd, and borders on patronizing: apparently, Geoghegan conceives of the Democratic base as a bunch of louts who can only be encouraged to vote if they are given a really dumbed-down ballot and are promised a pint of Pabst Blue Ribbon for their trouble. If this is what Democratic elites think of their own supporters, they should count their lucky stars if any of them bother to show up in November to cast a ballot for John F. Kerry—assuming he deigns to accept the nomination before then, that is.

Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber solicits contributions for the best political philosophy and (normative) political theory articles of the past decade.

I roughly estimate two dozen nominations so far. Exactly one of them appeared in The American Political Science Review. Open question: is there any subfield of political science that is well-represented by the travesty that is the contemporary APSR?