I've decided to take the week off from blogging about the war and politics (mainly because I'm on vacation anyway).

The good news is that I will still be posting some content to the blog. I'm going to brainstorm a chapter of my dissertation online in an effort to nail down a definition of “political sophistication,” and to think about the best way to measure it.

Political sophistication is one of the concepts that lurks out there in the study of public opinion; it basically originates from the desire of rational choice scholars to come up with a summary measure of a person's political savvy, without getting inside the nasty psychological “black box.” We generally hypothesize that people with higher levels of political sophistication think about politics in different ways than the less sophisticated; they use information differently than the less sophisticated when making political decisions (for example, when evaluating candidates and voting).

There is some debate over how different political sophistication and political knowledge are; most contemporary studies treat political knowledge as a proxy for sophistication, if not an exact equivalent. There are some other debates too, which I'll probably touch on later in the week.

(Prompted by Hit & Run's linkage to the Science Fiction Book Club's list of “The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years”, with the Foundation trilogy making it in at #2.)

Since I spent much of the weekend laid up with the seemingly annual recurrence of my sprained ankle, I finally got around to doing some light reading. My reading choice was the three books of Asimov's original Foundation trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. Much of the plot of the series revolves around the invention and seeming perfection of “psychohistory” by Hari Seldon, and the consequences thereof. From the Wikipedia:

Psychohistory was also the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov used the analogy of a gas, where whilst the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, the mass behavior of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. This concept he then applied to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates: that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large and that they should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.

In some ways (although Asimov came up with the concept before the behavioral revolution in political science, beginning with Voting and The American Voter), “psychohistory” sounds a lot like the work of the quantitative parts of the discipline, particularly in the fields of mass political behavior and international relations, albeit much evolved and with a predictive rather than an explanatory emphasis (we can reasonably predict short-term political phenomena, within limits, but there's nothing in the contemporary political science toolbox that would be able to predict how long the United States will persist, for example).

So it's fun to think about some of the parallels, although I'm not convinced it would be a good thing for the universe to have Jacob T. Levy, Daniel Drezner and myself operating in secret to keep our galactic plan on track. (Plus it would be a bit too close to the whole “Trilateral Commission” nonsense promulgated by the fringe.)

Of course, there's always the case to be made that psychohistory was just a Grade-A McGuffin... even within Asimov's universe!

At the end of Special Report with Brit Hume this afternoon, Brit had the usual roundtable of talking heads (or at least two-thirds thereof): Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes, and a woman from NPR whom I'd never laid eyes on before and whose name completely escapes me (apparently filling in for the third white guy who normally sits there). The contrast in the level of cooperation the U.S. has received from Turkey and Pakistan was on prominent display, and the panel largely attributed this difference to the fact that Turkey is a democracy while Pakistan isn't.

At some level, this is a gross simplification, at least in the Turkish case. While Turkey does have a popularly-elected government, the self-appointed guarantors of republicanism and secularism in the National Security Council and Constitutional Court keep Turkish democracy on something of a tight leash, not unlike the control of the Iranian majlis by its Assembly of Experts, albeit to much different ends. Yet clearly Turkey is moving in the direction of consolidating democracy, while Pakistan's situation is much more murky, having lurched back and forth between democracy and dictatorship since partition from India (and through the secession of Bangladesh). While modern Turkey has seen its authoritarian excesses, they pale in comparison to Pakistan's. On the other hand, the secularist impulses of the Turkish guardians often are excessive: notably, their obsession with headscarves, their requirement of Islamist parties to disavow Islam, and the seemingly arbitrary bans on popular political leaders.

So, one might ask: is managed democracy a viable system? More to the point, is it democratic? Even the “best” democracies have relatively unaccountable bodies that sometimes interfere with the will of popular representatives; the United States Supreme Court, Germany's Constitutional Court, and Britain's Law Lords to name just a few. How different is Turkey's National Security Council? Is it better to have Turkish-style stability or Pakistani intermittent democracy?

I'm not sure there are right answers to these questions, but they ought to weigh heavily on us in deciding how post-war Iraq will be governed. Do we go for the full Madison or Bagehot, and risk collapse in the medium to long term? Or do we settle for Ataturkism, and hope it eventually evolves into something better?

Eugene Volokh today talks about the 17th Amendment (while Jacob T. Levy links to a September post of his discussing the same topic). The 17th Amendment, adopted 80 years ago, changed the system for election of senators to the current system of popular election; originally, they were elected by the state legislatures (Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 1). The indirect election of Senators was primarily designed to give the states direct input in federal policymaking (see, for example, Federalist 62), and thus in some sense to reinforce federalism by acting as a check on the House of Representatives deciding to exceed the enumerated powers of Congress. (Some argue that the 17th Amendment, rather than the 16th, was the true enabler for big government.)

Of course, there are other issues at work that prevented the Senate from being an effective bulwark on federal power (even before the 17th Amendment); the principal-agent problem loomed large, with the interests of senators not necessarily coinciding with the state legislatures that chose them. One reason why the German Bundesrat works and persists as a powerful, indirectly elected chamber is that its members are true agents of the Land's parliament; by contrast, the pre-17th Senate had very weak principal-agent links (in order to promote institutional stability, another goal of the Senate's design), although whether the Framers intended it that way is unclear.

Jacob writes:

Even if the original 1787 apparatus were clearly better as a matter of constitutional engineering than the current mechanism, it might have been too politically fragile. If it had not bent with the 17th amendment, it might have broken later say, during the Terrible Twenties and Thirties when constitutional democracies were swept away by populist-authoritarianism in much of the world, and we had Longs, Coughlins, and Roosevelts of our own. A defense of the 17th along these lines is kind of like a defense of the 1937 "switch in time that saved nine" by the Supreme Court, not because the switch was constitutionally correct, but because it did manage to "save nine"-- that is, to save substantial judicial independence from a court packing precedent that would have left us with New Deal constitutional revisionism and with a cowed, subservient judiciary and with a precedent for presidents changing the constitutional rules whenever they weren't getting their way.

On balance, I think that the 17th Amendment had little effect in the long term. By the time of its passage, over half the states already had a de facto system for electing senators by popular vote; doubtless most other states would have followed suit eventually. In other words, the 17th is the result of a trend that was taking place anyway, codifying (and legitimating) the Progressivist change that was already on its way to being implemented nationwide. (And, among those changes, it was probably the least harmful procedural change that could have been institutionalized in the Constitution; far more harmful would have been a constitutionally-blessed role for parties as public utilities or a mandate for open primary elections. Of course, in other realms, the 18th was orders of magnitude worse, and also the result of Progressivist do-gooderism.) Ultimately the 17th was no more than a small chink in the armor of federalism, but if the Senate had remained a truly appointed body into the 1930s I agree its legitimacy would have been called into serious question — and perhaps its powers would have been evicerated by a Supreme Court more interested in preserving Marbury v. Madison and judicial review than federalism.

Incidentally, the relative design of the European Council of Ministers and the European Parliament is similar to that of the Bundesrat and Bundestag, although the EU institutions may be the sole current example of asymmetrical bicameralism where the upper chamber is vastly more powerful than the lower; however, it is telling that the phrase “democratic deficit” is virtually synonymous with the EU.

Jacob T. Levy has an interesting post on where the liberal tradition in France is going — mostly straight down the tubes. There's also some discussion in the comments at Matthew Yglesias's site.

I'm not sure if Yglesias is “quite the fashionable place to hang out these days,” but it's definitely more civil than most of the comment sections out there. Hence why I don't have comments here myself; too much hassle. If you want to comment, blog it and TrackBack (see the « links) here. :-)

Glenn Reynolds writes today on Howard Kurtz's observation that the media thinks we're more terrified than we actually are:

And yet, most people are going about their daily business. They have lived through so many stretches of media shrillness – abducted women, missing children, killer sharks – that it has become background noise. Repeated warnings about terrorism, and all the false alarms, have diluted their effectiveness. An orange alert becomes like a snow alert, just another fact of life.

Yes. Every time I see some anchor talk about how "frightened" and "jittery" we are, it just reminds me how out of touch Big Media people are.

We're not "jittery." Americans are determined, and angry. Spoiled media bigshots, used to living in a cocoon of bodyguards and obsequious staffers, are the ones who are "jittery." We saw this in the overwrought reaction to the anthrax attacks last year, and we're seeing it again.

The good news is that their shrillness, as Kurtz notes, actually works against the terrorists. They've managed to make terrorism boring.

The interesting question here is: What are the likely effects of this exaggeration on public opinion?

Diana Mutz and Joe Soss, in their article “Reading Public Opinion: The Influence of News Coverage on Perceptions of Public Sentiment” (Public Opinion Quarterly vol. 61 [1997]) looked at the effect of a “public journalism” effort in Madison, Wisconsin, where one local newspaper highlighted an alleged lack of affordable housing and the other didn't. While they found that the public journalism effort didn't really affect how readers perceived the issue (readers of both newspapers had approximately equal opinions about the problem), those who read the paper that emphasized the issue were more likely to think that their fellow citizens thought the issue was important. (This is termed a “third-person effect.”)

So, what does this have to do with media hysteria about terror? What it suggests is that while people won't individually feel less secure, they will feel like their communities believe they are less secure. This could lead to more widespread support for anti-terrorism measures that otherwise would exist — undermining traditional support for civil liberties by media elites. In other words, “terror exaggeration” is likely to erode public support for values that most of the media (and indeed, most Americans) find desirable: freedom of expression and association and the right to privacy.

Michael Jennings has a new post that talks about upper houses in Australia; unlike Canada (where, if I recall correctly, none of the upper houses remain except the federal Senate, which more resembles the Lords than either the Australian or American Senate in its powers and composition), five of the six Australian states still have upper houses, yet also have parliamentary governments, which tend to lead to weak upper houses.

My personal observation is that bicameralism works best when powers are symmetric; asymmetric bicameralism can quickly reduce one house, normally the upper house, to irrelevance. But, asymetric systems can be useful in a parliamentary system, provided the restraint provided by an upper house is seen to be legitimate.

Incidentally, the U.S. Senate, like the upper houses in most Washingtonian presidential systems*, does have slightly more power than the House — primarily, the confirmation power of “advice and consent.” However, most scholars consider Congress symmetric, and that is certainly the case in terms of the ordinary legislative powers of the two chambers.

Link via Jacob Levy; previous discussion is here.

* My spur-of-the-moment coinage to compare with “Westminster parliamentary systems,” to describe the presidential systems used in most Latin American countries and the Philippines, which are based on the U.S. system of separation of powers. (Nebraska wouldn't be a pure Washingtonian system, because of the lack of an upper house. This is the most egregious example, but most states depart from the Washingtonian model in certain respects.) Let's see if that one's as successful as “Lottroversy.”

Jacob T. Levy has the scoop on the latest discussions in blog-world (from Iain Murray and Michael Jennings) on the abject failure of Lords reform in Britain to get anywhere. (I meant to post on it earlier but got distracted by bright, shiny objects.) The telling sentence:

Now that the traditional British constitution has been abolished, with astonishingly little debate and no clear sense of what to replace it with, that's proving to be a real disadvantage.

Incidentally, upper houses in general have proved themselves rather pointless without either federalism or feudalism as a justification. Take U.S. states for example, post-Baker v. Carr (369 U.S. 186)*: one state (Nebraska) has abolished its upper house, while the rest just plod along with an upper house that's smaller but otherwise elected on the same basis of representation (single member districts, first-past-the-post) as the lower house. While this arrangement does preserve the check of requiring both bodies to agree, it's not clear how much of a check this is as a practical matter (free grad student paper idea: compare the rate of passage of legislation in the Nebraska legislature to a bicameral state).

It seems to me that proportional representation (either pure PR, or the “top-off” form used in Britain's subnational legislatures that still allows some districts) is the ideal solution for making upper houses more relevant: it also has the bonus (if you go for pure PR) of not requiring redistricting fights. Even regional PR might be a good idea — states like Mississippi and Tennessee that have notable sub-state regions (the three Supreme Court districts of Mississippi and Tennessee's Grand Divisions) could use them as the basis for regional lists, apportioning the seats by population.

The downside is that it would probably lead to more partisan state legislatures, so PR Senates may only be desirable in states that already have strongly partisan legislatures — so Tennessee would probably be a reasonable case, while Mississippi may not be.

Previous discussion here.

* Baker v. Carr and its successors invalidated the apportionment of legislative chambers in the United States on any basis other than population under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, with the sole exception of the U.S. Senate (whose apportionment is specified in the Constitution in a particularly airtight fashion).

Want to establish a better partisanship score for Congress? Here's my methodology: get footage from a wide-angle camera mounted on the ceiling of the House Chamber. At every applause line in the State of the Union, compute an "agreement with the President" score based on: Does X clap? Does X stand? Sum the scores for each Senator and Representative.

$20 says it correlates at .95 or better with DW-NOMINATE Dimension One. And you don't even have to do any icky scaling; just enslave a few grad students to do the math... :-)

I really don't have a dog in the John Lott controversy, but fellow political scientist Mark A. Kleiman has a round-up of the leftist perspective (and Julan Sanchez has some thoughts too). At the very least, the whole "Mary Rosh" business seems at once both silly and undignified for a scholar. As far as the rest goes, I'm much more interested in arguments over the econometrics and evidence supporting the main argument of the book, rather than ruminations over the 98% figure (98% of "brandishments" did not result in use) which is mostly tangential to the main argument (although I will grant that Lott's defenses of the 98% figure are specious at best). I will say that the "predictive power" test of an econometric model is generally not accepted in the social sciences; rather, we seek to maximize explanatory power. Without having analyzed the data myself, though, I can't state to my satisfaction whether the model is appropriate or not.

Michelle Malkin weighs in, and she's unimpressed with Lott's defense.

(Via Glenn Reynolds:) Clayton Cramer writes on the problems with Michael Bellesiles' research in Arming America; he concludes that a lack of critical analysis by historians (including poor quantitative reasoning skills) and political diversity within the discipline allowed Bellesiles' work to pass largely uncriticized. While his discussion largely centers around history, there are lessons for other disciplines — including political science.

I find political science to be a more politically diverse discipline than history (and most of the humanities and social sciences, with the exception of economics), perhaps due in part to the strong influence of economists on the quantitative part of the discipline, although the political left is predominant (the “right” of the discipline is mostly libertarian and neo-conservative; I have yet to meet a paleoconservative political scientist). However, there has been a backlash in the form of the “perestroika movement” over the past two years; for a lighthearted look, see “Some Thoughts on Perestroika on Political Science”. (For the record, I'm an empiricist who mostly does quantitative work.)

Glenn Reynolds (Sith Lord) passes on word that Knopf is stopping the print run of Arming America.

Eugene Volokh comments on some weird results he's finding in perusing some Los Angeles Times poll data.

Contemporary social scientists would argue that a lot of what Eugene is seeing is due to a problem that political scientist/sociologist Philip Converse first identified around three decades ago, something he called “non-attitudes”. His basic point is that responses to survey questions often don't reflect respondents' true attitudes about things; if they don't have a real attitude, often they just make something up on the fly to stand in for it. Others have argued that “public opinion” is merely constructed; there is no such thing as public opinion until you start asking questions.

Political scientist John Zaller (who I've mentioned before in this category, and is probably the leading authority in public opinion research today) doesn't necessarily agree that there are non-attitudes; rather, people in responding to survey questions sample from their relevant “considerations” (or underlying attitudes) based in large part on question wording.

Getting to Eugene's quandry: the concept of "weapons of mass destruction" may activate particular considerations in women that it doesn't in men — women may have a more visceral reaction to the possibility of Saddam nuking innocent civilians than men do, for example. The second question uses "George W. Bush" as part of its wording; since women are less supportive of Bush than men, the gender disparity may be due to the “Bush considerations” being more heavily weighed here. One need not believe that “many voters' views are ill-formed” (which I think would be Converse's argument) to accept these results as valid.

Philippe DeCroy of the Volokh Conspiracy talks a bit about the editorial effects of the Harold Raines regime on the New York Times. Not being a regular NYT reader these days (I did read it for about a year in college, but decided it wasn't worth spending the money on later in life), I can't vouch for Philippe's impression of a decided turn toward the paper's wearing its liberalism on its sleeve; Philippe argues this has caused him(?) to lose confidence in the paper's reporting.

The "problem" of media bias has been widely studied in political science and communications studies. At least in the modern U.S., most media bias has been seen primarily in terms of the framing and agenda-setting powers of the media: deciding how issues are to be presented and what issues should be discussed. Perhaps the most thorough work on this has been John Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and his work on the impacts of the media on public opinion (most notably, "The Myth of Massive Media Impact Revived"). One of Zaller's arguments is that people gain political knowledge due to the information that they are exposed to; this information can be either factual (as we traditionally view "information") or biased in some way. For people to make "good" or well-informed political decisions, they have to be exposed to multiple sources of information, and they have to be able to sort out that information. Other studies have shown that so-called "negative advertising" is a very good source of this information in political campaigns, because unlike most "positive" advertising, it talks about issues and other things that are politically relevant. Despite the ravings of the campaign finance reform crowd, who want strict limits on political advertising, negative TV campaigns tell us much more about candidates than anything else.

Similarly, the media provide information. The best way to learn (i.e. get information) about something is to find lots of reports of the same event from different perspectives; Google News is a near-perfect implementation of this capability, although you'll probably find that most of the reports are based on one "unbiased" AP report, which limits one's ability to integrate: to take the event viewed from various perspectives, process them through the observers' biases, and come up with what actually happened. Somewhere between The New York Times's version of events and that presented in The Washington Times is the truth; if you're open-minded enough to read both, their individual biases don't matter so much as your ability to recognize those biases and include them in how you evaluate what happened.

Virginia Postrel also writes about the Georgia elections and what they may have had to do with the flag change there; she links to an article in Metropolis magazine talking about how the flags' design could have been an issue in their success or failure.

At least in Mississippi, that didn't make a difference. A former colleague, D'Andra Orey, took a look at the issue and found racial attitudes were the prime factor on how people viewed the flag issue. The fact that the proposed banner was butt-ugly and had no historical significance to the state was beside the point. (The Metropolis piece also talks about this to some extent.)

The reality is that the Mississippi Legislature — particularly the white Democrats who run the place, despite the fact that the Republicans and black Democrats could easily make a power-play if they felt like it — made a shrewd political calculation: they punted on the issue to save their jobs (a reasonable thing to do; realignment hasn't reached the state legislature here yet, but voting for a new flag was one sure-fire way to make sure it did), and they counted on having the popular mandate to not change the flag to insulate them from any backlash from the NAACP and other groups pressuring for change. The only possible downside for the legislature's white Democrats, who really didn't want a new flag anyway, was that if Mississippi's black population had decided to turn out disproportionately in the election, they could have gotten the new flag. In the end, only 30% of the electorate showed up, and the "old" flag won in a number of majority-black counties. Realignment was forestalled, the NAACP went away, and nobody in the state really seemed to care all that much.

Of course, virtually nobody in the state cared much about what anyone outside of the state thought either, which is probably why Mississippi is viewed as little more than a collection of backwater hicks and a source of occasional "local color" for Robert Altman films.

Tacitus has some thoughts on state legislatures vis à vis political parties and the liberalism-conservatism scale. It's an interesting piece as far as it goes, but it begs a couple of empirical questions:

1. Why do Republicans fail to compete effectively for the median voter in "liberal" states? Democrats in the South seem able to separate themselves from the national party, yet this eludes Republicans. Is it simply a matter of gerrymandering or incumbent advantage? (Some political scientists would argue that on the "local" issues Dems have the advantage of the right issue positions, though; no state legislator is ever going to have to vote on defense or national security, two Republican-"owned" issues, to borrow from John Petrocik.)

2. Why does Democratic control of state legislatures persist in states that elect Republicans regularly to national office?

Some people have gotten at corners of these questions (and I'd cite them if I could remember them offhand; the realignment literature is an interesting place to start), but I don't think there's been a good answer yet. And a good answer might actually be relevant to the real world, something us PoliSci people are rarely good at providing.