The Power and the Money

Mexico’s amendable constitution

That’s “amendable,” not “amenable.”  

Too many observers have recently declared that Mexico’s energy reform is safe, because it was enshrined in the Mexican constitution as an amendment. And why would they be wrong? Amendments certainly look difficult to change. It takes a 2/3rds majority of both houses of Congress and a majority of the state legislatures to pass one. That certainly looks like a high bar!

Except that if the bar were really high, the Constitution of 1917 wouldn’t have been amended 232 times in 101 years. Or 64 times in the past dozen. That’s right, Mexico has been amending its constitution once every ten weeks.

For whatever reason, an amendment process that is on paper equivalent to the United States is in practice much much easier. How did that happen?

Let’s start by saying what did not happen. Many analysts, yours truly included, thought the high amendment rate of the Mexican constitution was a epiphenomenon. The phenomenon was that Mexico was a one-party state in which the written Constitution did not matter. Since the constitution did not matter and the ruling party controlled all branches of government, amendments could be passed for propaganda reasons and without consideration of their effects.

Sounds good, right? The problem with the above hypothesis is its converse corollary: If the Mexican constitution was amended all the time because the country was a one-party dictatorship, then the amendment rate should fall when it becomes a multiparty democracy.

Well, sometime around 1997 the country became a multiparty democracy. But the rate of amendment rose from 1.6 amendments per year to more than five. So much for that idea, then.

So what is the reason?

The first thing to keep in mind is that Mexican political parties are much more centralized than their American equivalents. When the party bosses say “jump,” (most of) the legislators ask “How high?” For example, once energy reform made it out of the Congress, it took only 83 hours for a majority of the state legislatures to ratify. Imagine that happening in the United States.

Second, the President can introduce amendments under his or her power to introduce legislation. Until 2012, they could introduce them straight to the relevant committee. In practice, that means that a Mexican president can almost always get their preferred amendments to the floor for a vote.

Third, Mexican parties are more transactional than ideological. The PRI can turn its positions on a dime for electoral (or other) advantage. The Green Party, despite its, name, is not particularly concerned about the environment. Rather, it is a family enterprise, winning seats in order to collect federal subsidies which it uses to maintain its seats, parceling out votes to the highest bidder.  The PAN and PRD are a little more ideological, but the PAN in particular has a long and successful history of logrolling and the PRD has split. 

Finally, Mexican politicians have no choice but to amend the constitution if they want to govern. Too many policies are enshrined in the Mexican constitution. The bloody thing is now 61,765 words long, up from 27,122 back in 1917. If Mexican politicians suddenly developed stronger norms about amendments, then the country would become ungovernable.

To put this in context, Mexico isn’t the only Latin American country with a flexible and overly-detailed constitution. The difference is that the other countries have amendment process that look easy. Colombia’s 1991 constitution runs 47,383 words and has been amended at almost as high a rate. But with a few exceptions, Colombia’s constitution can be amended by two consecutive majority votes of both houses. That is barely a bar at all.

The Brazilian  constitution is only a little bit harder to amend: you need 60% of both houses to vote twice. The Peruvian constitution (which is a paragon of brevity at 18,341 words) allows for amendments with either a majority vote plus referendum or a two-thirds vote of Congress twice. It’s no surprise that those countries alter their constitutions with regularity. What makes Mexico unique is that it has an amendment process that looks fairly onerous … but isn’t.

In other words, Mexico suffers from many many ills, but legislative gridlock is not one of them. That is a good thing, but it means that supporters of the energy reform shouldn’t get too complacent. It wouldn’t take the second coming of Lyndon Baines Johnson to undo the amendments. It would just take some political skill. Of which there is no short supply in Mexico right now.

Now, that is not to say that I think reform is about to be completely undone ...

The roots of Argentine street violence

The pension reform passed the lower house yesterday on a vote of 127-117. The legislative process has been fine, notwithstanding the near-fistfight on the floor and a lot of disingenuous rhetoric from the government. In those terms, and those terms alone, Argentine representative democracy looks to be in better shape than American representative democracy.

But the street response has been nothing less than shocking.

Why? Well, there are two hypotheses.

The first hypothesis is that the mobs were organized by the Peronist opposition to discredit the Macri’s Cambiemos coalition. In this view, the pension reform is only a convenient excuse for an opposition facing an existential struggle against its ideological opponents.

The second hypothesis is that the Macri administration miscalculated the meaning of its recent electoral victory. It failed to realize was how little trust it enjoyed. In this view, the violence is an inevitable product of the government’s attempt to offload adjustment onto the middle class in a society even more polarized than the United States.

Which view is correct? Likely both.

There is certainly a history of Argentine political actors orchestrating street violence for political ends. Consider Javier Auyero’s (U.T.-Austin) magisterial study of the 2001 riots. In his words: “Three mechanisms [operated] during the episodes: 1. the creation of opportunities by party brokers and police agents, 2. the validation of looting by state elites, and 3. the signalling spiral carried out by party brokers.” Similarly, soccer fan clubs have employed violence to help politicians. Politicized soccer violence emerged during General Jorge Videla’s dictatorship (1976-83). Videla organized fans to pressure potential opponents; the “barras bravas” also became a convenient venue to channel payoffs to regime supporters. After democracy returned in 1983, the barrabravas began to sell their “services” to various politicians. In short, there is a history of party politicians inciting and using violence; it would be more surprising if nobody abetted the recent riots. The President certainly thinks that somebody did.

But the Macri administration has ] given working or middle class Argentines little reason to trust it. He has made no moves to apply scratchy hairshirts to the richest: the (unavoidable) austerity is going to fall squarely on the middle class. The pension reform came in the wake of a  punishing series of electricity rate hikes with no commensurate increase in service.* It also comes in the wake of Macri’s post-election declaration that he wants to cut taxes on business and investors; no sign of a progressive tax reform here, a la Chile or Uruguay. (More on Uruguay here.) Pain always goes down better when it’s shared.

It is true that some sort of pension reform will be necessary and it is true that the opposition has both the means and the desire to foment street violence. But it’s the reluctance to spread the pain of austerity up the income ladder that lies, I think, at the heart of the problem.

* Electricity reliability is measured via two indices. SAIDI measures the average annual outage time per customer. In the United States, the median utility has a SAIDI around 1.5 hours (NYC is 0.3); in Argentina, it’s 4.5. SAIFI measures the average annual number of outages per customer. In the U.S., it’s about 1.1 (with NYC having 0.1). In Argentina, it’s 16.2. Mexico, for further comparison, is 0.8 and 1.0 in Mexico City and 0.5 and 0.6 in Monterrey. (The World Bank tracks these numbers.) To be fair, one wouldn’t expect electricity provision to improve in a day after a decade of Peronist mismanagement, but that is a reason for Macri to tread lightly.

Observatorio argentino 37: A long hot summer of pension reform

It is summer in Buenos Aires. And it is proving to be a hot one. 

Political violence right before Christmas is a recent Argentine regularity. In December 1999, a protest by workers owed back salaries in Corrientes province grew out of hand and resulted in two deaths. In December 2001, the forced conversion of people’s dollar bank deposits into pesos worth a third as much provoked riots that killed 39 people. In November 2005, I was in Mar de Plata for the riots around a visit by President Bush. In December 2010, thousands of Paraguayan and Bolivian immigrants occupied a park in the southwestern reaches of the city. As you can imagine, the locals did not react well: Mayor Mauricio Macri called in the police and four people died before the federal Gendarmerie and naval special forces broke it up and cleared the area. In December 2013 the police themselves went on strike; in Córdoba, the result was looting, the arrival of the Gendarmerie, and at least one death. 

And now there is December 2017. Nobody has died, so far, but at last count 81 people were in the hospital ... 48 of whom are cops. A general strike is on, shutting the airports and the subway. That is today; on Thursday there was an earlier wave of rioting resulting in busted windows and burning cars. 

What is it all about? Short answer: pension reform. On November 29, the Senate voted 43-23 to advance an administration proposal to rejigger the formula for state pensions.  Rejigger how, exactly? Well, that has been giving me a headache but I think I have got it. 

The current pension formula adjust pensions as follows. Every six months, the pension fund averages the wage index (the higher of the Ripte or Indec indexes) and the nominal growth in total social security tax receipts. The resulting number (plus a top-off that I still do not understand) gives the percentage hike in pensions. The law has a floor: nominal pensions cannot fall even if nominal salaries and nominal tax collections decrease. (To be frank, in an inflationary economy like Argentina, a nominal fall in anything is unlikely in the extreme.) 

On paper, this does not seem like a bad system. It links changes in outflows to changes in inflows. Pension spending might be too high given the level of tax collection, but they should not grow out of control, at least not because of the formula.

But ... the formula does make pensions volatile. For example, in 2015 pensions grew by 4% in real terms, but they fell 6% in 2016, only to recover 3% this year. In other words, there is a case for pension reform beyond the vague “pensions are too expensive” that you usually hear. 

Of course, that case would be more persuasive if, well, pensioners were the ones pushing the reform.

The real issue is that the pension system has been underfunded ever since President Kirchner granted state pensions to slightly more than 2 million elderly who had never worked in the formal sector. It does not matter if the current indexing formula is a fine one if the system is paying out more than it takes in. Something needs to be done and this is something. 

The proposed change (text here) switches the index to the following: 70% inflation and 30% wage increases, plus a top-up for GDP growth that I do not understand. The adjustments will be switched from every six months to every three months. The reform implies that the pension administrator will miss a top-up during the changeover to the new system, so it proposes an extra one-time adjustment, aka “the splice.” Weirdly, however, the adjustments will still be delayed six months: the end-of-March increase, for example, will reflect inflation in October-December, not January-March.

Does your head hurt yet? Mine certainly did. I found a nice chart at Infobae that runs down the difference between the old and new systems. Short version: most pensioners will come out behind under the new scheme compared to the old one. It might save around $4 billion in the short term, perhaps. In the long term, who knows? But it is likely to reduce expenditures relative to the old formula.

The vote sailed through the Senate based on a deal President Macri struck with the state governors. As part of that deal, he got the governors to agree to let him transfer quite a lot of money to Governor María Eugenia Vidal of Buenos Aires province. Vidal is a member of Macri’s political party, the Republican Proposal (PRO); he needs her to succeed. So it is hard to get past the idea that President Macri is using pension reform to finance Governor Vidal. 

The lower house had to cut off debate when it looked like it was about to devolve into a fistfight.

So there you have it. The reform is basically a cut in pensions. Most of the short-term savings will go to the provincial governments in return for their agreement to drop a lawsuit claiming funds from the federal government. The big winner if it passes will be B.A. province, where a PRO governor recently took it back from the Peronists for the first time in 30 years. But the formula change is tinkering around the edges of a massively underfunded pension system; very little economic gain for a lot of political pain.

That said, by current American standards the whole debate seems refreshingly honest, wholesome, fair and open. And no, that is not something I thought I would have written a year ago.

Bad news in tragedy avoided: building codes and the Mexican earthquake

Four days ago, I worried that the smaller force of the recent quake meant that we could not be sure that better building standards were the reason fewer buildings collapsed. There was some pushback in comments, noting that the epicenter was much closer to Mexico City in 2017 than in 1985. There was also some pushback on Twitter making a similar point. The Twitter exchange ended with Leticia Arroyo-Abad presciently saying that we could tell nothing from the size the quake because “it would depend on how different frequencies affect different structures.”

And she is absolutely right. The New York Times now reports that the closer distance of the 2017 quake meant that the shaking was far less damaging to buildings above six stories in height. Moreover, a 2016 study showed that many new buildings did not meet the minimum requirements of the building code. 

This photograph was taken in the same neighborhood as the new high rise mentioned in the NYT article, the one which collapsed. (More details here.) We know people who live in new buildings in that neighborhood. They dodged a bullet. There should have been no bullet to dodge, even in a 7.1 quake. That makes me angry. 

 

The jury is still out, but evidence is piling up that repeat of the 1985 quake would have killed far more people than the one Mexico City just experienced. The heads of bureaucrats and politicians in CDMX need to roll. The Line 12 saga shows that Mexico can have such a reckoning ... and once we are over counting our blessings and celebrating the heroism of the citizenry, this reckoning should be big. 

Propaganda in the age of artificial intelligence

Have you ever watched television commercials from the 1950s? They seem crude and unpersuasive, even silly. Political propaganda from the 1930s even more so and don’t get me started on print adverts from the 19th century. They actually persuaded people?

Well, yes, they probably did. Our culture has evolved in the presence of ever-more sophisticated advertising. Our defense mechanisms have also risen; ads either have to very sophisticated or do nothing more than present basic information in order to succeed. (See “Len the Plumber” for an example of the latter. All it does it tell you that you can get same-day service at that number; considering the cost of searching for a same-day plumber, it gets business despite presenting no information other than that it exists. And an annoying earwig to make sure you do not forget.)

New technology, however, allows for new ways to get around our cultural immune systems. We have seen the rise of Fox (cable television being the technology)  and fake news (going through social media). But two things are about to make the situation incredibly worse. (Hat tip: Will Baird.)

1. It is getting easier and easier to fake video of people saying things that they never actually said. It is no coincidence that the researchers at the link used footage of President Obama to create their fake clip. 
2. It is getting easier and easier to automate fake online comments and reviews, aka “crowdturfing.” The authors propose some potential fixes which might work for review websites ... but maybe not so much for social media. 

I am fairly sure democracy can survive these innovations. I am also fairly sure that democracies will work less well and lose legitimacy because of them. My worry is that our cultural immune systems will never adapt, or worse yet, adapt by crawling into our own epistemic fortresses.

The 2020 election is shaping up to be awful; 2024 more so; and I do not want to think about 2028 or 2032, when my children will be able to vote. 

Anyone able to provide an optimistic counterargument? Surely some techno-optimists are left, or any form of optimist, really. 

The problem with political quizzes

In recent years, Dutch politics has fragmented. In part, this is a function of the country’s extreme form of proportional representation, which allows very small parties into Parliament. In addition, ballot access is easy. All you need to do is put up a refundable deposit of €11,250 and you’re on.

Nonetheless, the Dutch party system has seen increasing fragmentation in recent years. The standard measure of the effective number of parties takes each party’s share of seats, squares them, and adds up the result. A two-party system will always have a number below two, since one party or the other will have a majority. A system in which one party wins a majority will always have a number below four.

The number has issues, of course, all measures do. For example, it suggests that a parliament with three equally-sized parties (3.0 effective parties) is about the same as one with a majority party (53%) and five smaller ones (3.1 effective parties). Obviously whether that is true depends on the ability of those parties to form coalitions: the first system might be a competitive kaleidoscope while the second system could be a de facto one-party state. Or vice versa. In short, the measure does not tell you how easy it is to form governments or how different the possible coalitions on offer might be. 

Still, the measure captures the degree of parliamentary fractionalization quite well. And you can use it to make comparisons across time. And so, here is the number of effective parties in the postwar Netherlands:

Rising fragmentation creates a problem for voters, of course: which party to vote for? There are more options than ever and many of those options are brand new.

Well, André Krouwel a political scientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, developed an online survey to help voters with this problem. A quarter of Dutch voters used it in the 2017 election. Since this will be relevant for me in the next Dutch general election, I decided to give it a whirl.

And to my surprise, it pegged me as a Christian Union voter. Huh? I took it again, same result.

So I took a different survey. Now I was with the Greens (officially “GreenLeft”), which makes more sense.

What went wrong the first time out? Well, simple: the quiz did not properly weight the importance of each question. Consider the following two sets of political positions:

1. Abolishing legal suicide
2. Recriminalizing marijuana
3. Toughening criminal justice
4. Ending automatic organ donation unless you opt-out

 and

1. Opposing mandatory national service
2. Abolishing health care deductibles
3. Ending nuclear power
4. Enabling referenda to overturn laws
5. Liberalizing dismissal laws

The first group are policies with which I disagree with the Christian Union and agree with the Greens. The second group are policies about which which I disagree with the Greens and agree with the Christian Union.

With the exception of #4 on the first list, I feel rather strongly about these issues. With the exception #4 on the second list, I do not feel particularly strongly about these issues. So I am much closer to the Greens than to the Christian Union. But the election survey had no way to know this.

Aside: why am I unbothered about where I disagree with the Greens? Well, (1) is not going to happen so whatever. (2) is an issue, but the Greens recognize that premiums will have to rise; I disagree about the tradeoff but the Greens are not peddling nirvana. (3) is a major issue for Europe and the world ... but the Netherlands has only one small nuclear power plant. (5) is also a real issue, but the Dutch labor market performs all right regardless, so it is hard to get worked up either way.

There are a lot more policies on which the two parties agree, by the way. The Christian Union is a weird animal by American standards, being socially conservative but redistributionist, pro-immigration and very green. In fact, GreenLeft came into being from a merger of four parties, one of which was an openly Christian organization called the Evangelical People’s Party.

Anyway, to return to the title of this post, beware these political quizzes, including the ones that try to site you in some sort of two-axis issue space. They have trouble capturing issue valence and are therefore not to be trusted.

The power of propaganda

We may be in Mexico, but sometimes you get pulled back into discussing home.

Donald Trump just gave two very disturbing speeches. In one, he portrayed Long Island as an embattled paradise turned hellscape by violent Latino immigrants. In the other, he called for more police brutality. It is a continuation of a theme he started during the campaign.

What’s crazy is that Long Island is safer than it’s ever been. If you look at juvenile homicide arrests, you get basically nothing save for three in 2014, another one in 2016 and six this year. It is true that MS-13 recently carried out some horrific crimes in Suffolk. But that is not a crime wave.

So how does Trump get any traction? Sadly, I know the answer. I have family on Long Island and in South Florida.

These places are similar, heavily populated by the descendants of white Ellis Island immigrants, the generation of people who shaped America’s liberal version of itself. Jews, Italians, and Irish all turned into Americans by the melting pot. Yet current segregation, presidential propaganda, and the folk memory of the genuine crime explosion of the 1960s and 1970s, combines to make them all ready to believe things that just ain’t so.

Consider two anecdotes. I was in Broward County with my daughter at an outdoor zoo, where save for the bear and panthers the kiddos can walk around and interact with the animals. At one point, my daughter sprints out of the bathroom after we wash her hands. I’m not worried, not least because I’m there with family: her cousin, uncle and great-uncle are all outside. But this older white guy next to me, he says, “You ought to get one of those child leashes.” I say nah, why? 

“Crime. It’s crazy out there. Worse than ever.”

Me: no, not really, I grew up in New York in the 1970s and it was far more dangerous.

“I’m from New York too! Really, you think it’s safer now?”

Me: I know it. Look at how the city has changed, look at how Miami has changed. And then I show him some graphs (available at the Marshall Project). And he gets sort of quiet, as if he never expected a middle-aged white guy to take issue with what seemed to him to be an anodyne comment about an obvious truth.

Then the same conversation happens with my (very liberal) brother two days later.

With my brother, I showed him news stories from the 1980s when he lived in Miami that drove the point home. He was a little abashed: despite his own experience regularly travelling to neighborhoods that would have given him pause 20 years ago, despite his own daughter living in a formerly n0-go part of Plantation, and despite his knowledge of overall crime trends the incessant propaganda of the past two years had convinced him of something that just was not true.

Maybe the internet really has made the creation of alternate facts easier than in the past, but the alternative fact of “American carnage” has been created by just a presidential soapbox combined with the predilections of white people to believe the worst about their non-white neighbors. 

In short, as long as that predilection exists, demogogues will be able to make hay by making stuff up. The internet has affected American politics for the worse. But this is not one of the ways.

What makes a nation?

Florida is a bizarre state. Not only is it different in extreme from the rest of the country; different parts of Florida are different in the extreme from each other. It just should not work. But somehow it does. Every so often somebody idly proposes splitting the state, but it’s never gone anywhere. Ditto secession. Despite the enthusiasm with which non-Americans jump on news of secession movements in California, Texas, Hawaii and Vermont, none of them show even the slightest sign of going anywhere.

Why then is the European Union in trouble or the United Kingdom under threat? It isn’t political oppression, despite what the people in England (regards Europe) or Scotland (regards England) might tell you. Both polities are acceptably democratic, no matter what objections you might have to the constitutional particulars. Is it language? Obviously not in the case of the United Kingdom, and almost-certainly not in the case of the people demanding Brexit, since the European Union has done nothing to weaken English. (Nor any other language; quite the reverse, by demanding full translations from everything into everything.) 

So what is it? Why is the U.K. under strain and why is the E.U. under strain? The obvious answer is that the cultural splits in Europe are much bigger than their equivalents in the United States. 

Alberto Alesina (Harvard), Guido Tabellini (Bocconi), and Francesco Trebbi (U. of British Columbia) decided to answer that question. What did they find? Well, simply put, cultural differences within Europe are less than within the United States. You got that? Texans and New Yorkers differ more in their beliefs about family, religion, trust, sexuality and the state than do Castillians and Dutch or Greeks and Germans. Moreover, cultural differences within European states are bigger than the differences between European states. 

(Amusingly, you can use their methodology to compute the most European part of Europe. You get Germany and Austria. But you also get the Belgium, the Netherlands, and oddly enough big chunks of Spain and Portugal. So much for stereotypes.)

In summation:

A comparison between the E.U. and the U.S. suggests that fundamental cultural differences among Americans are not bigger than that amongst Europeans. Along this dimension, if Americans can share a well functioning federal union, so could Europeans. Needless to say, the United States had 250 years of nation building and 150 years have gone by from the Civil War. Europe has had a much shorter common history and only 70 years have gone by since the last inter-European war. Americans share a common language and geographic mobility in the U.S. has been much higher than within Europe, or even within individual European countries. Mobility helped creating a melting pot and thus a common identity, but apparently did not dampen cultural heterogeneity.

In other words, you are left with nationalism as a defining force by itself. Which leaves you with two possible implications:

1. It might be easier to build a European polity than the current troubles imply;
2. Building any multinational polity is impossible. Two political communities can be identical in every respect, but as long as they define themselves as nations then it will be very hard to create a shared polity;
3. We are reading too much into all this. The stability of the United States and the problems of the United Kingdom are both contingent. Give the U.S. a few bad breaks or give the U.K. better politicos and none of this would be happening. 

Thoughts? It certainly seems as if nationalism has a mysterious strength of its own. But maybe not! Maybe it is all on (3): political communities grow and disintegrate in hinky contingent ways; nationalism follows (or doesn’t.) Frex, you can’t get the near-identical West Indies to unite but you have no problem holding the unbelievably diverse United States together. 

What can we learn from Huey Long?

Back during the Obama administration, critics always used to say that there was too much “uncertainty.” Business executives being fragile flowers and all, they could not be expected to make tough decisions without absolute 100% certainty about everything.

That argument made no sense back then. After all, the Obama administration was well inside American norms during 2009-10 … and hamstrung afterwards. You can make a case that the DAPA order pushed executive action too far, but that’s really not what people were complaining about. Anyway, investment steadily rose during the Obama administration while the cost-of-capital remained low, meaning that the whole premise of the argument that “uncertainty” mattered was based on nothing.

The Trump administration, however, has brought the whole argument over “uncertainty” roaring back! Here we are, a month in, and you’ve got political uncertainty galore. Will Obamacare survive? Will the administration survive? Will it lash out? What norms will be broken? How can you trust a government that lies with such ease about everything? How bad will corruption get? Will we have a trade war? A real war? Civil unrest? Impeachment? WHO KNOWS! RUN FOR THE HILLS! CASH UNDER THE MATRESSES!!!

Or maybe let’s take a deep breath and ask if there is anything that history can tell us. Turns out that there is! In the 1930s, Huey Long ran a very Trumpian administration in Louisiana. Governor Long was, in fact, the model for an American dictator in It Can’t Happen Here. (A novel I recommend, by the way. Free at the link.)

The picture, yes, is of Texas, not Louisiana. I was just in Austin and will be returning fairly often. I’ve only been to Louisiana once, in 2004, when I stopped outside Baton Rouge on my way to Boston from Mexico City. (I also drove through New Orleans in 1996, on my way from Florida to California.) The place seemed crazy, but then again I was idiotic enough to decide to stop into a biker bar outside the city. I’m fairly certain that my Army Reserve ID was the only thing that kept me from severe physical harm.

But I digress. Let’s return to Huey Long. His regime really was that wild, wilder than any 2004 biker bar. In 1928, he won election. He then trampled over what little civil service there was in Louisiana, firing opponents and forcing state employees to donate to his campaigns. He passed out jobs to active legislators. (Really. He did that.) He imposed taxes on political opponents. In fact, he threatened to impose taxes that business people considered tantamount to expropriation. In return, they had to negotiate with him. When one opponent complained by saying, “Maybe you’ve heard of this book. It’s the Constitution of the State of Louisiana,” Long replied, “I’m the Constitution around here now.”

It got wilder. In 1930, he won a Senate seat but postponed taking it while remaining as governor. He then installed a puppet, Oscar Allen, who won in a massively fraudulent election. Allen was such a puppet that Long’s brother said, “A leaf once blew in to Allen’s office and fell on his desk. Allen signed it.” The legislature, meanwhile, turned into a Soviet rubber-stamp: the governor’s bills passed in minutes. He passed a newspaper tax he called the “tax on lying.” On 1934, he strengthened the Bureau of Criminal Identification, an agency empowered to make warrantless arrests throughout Louisiana. In 1935, the opposition was reduced to organizing a paramilitary to seize the Baton Rouge courthouse, prompting Senator Long to declare martial law. To cap it off, he established a state printing board that could effectively shut down any newspaper in the state.

Finally, Carl Weiss shot him on September 10, 1935.

So talk about uncertainty! That was American uncertainty. If uncertainty matters, we should see it in Louisiana under Long.

So Gabriel Mathy (American University) and Nicolas Ziebarth (Auburn) went looking to see what uncertainty did to the Louisiana economy under Long! In a forthcoming paper for the Journal of Economic History, they constructed uncertainty measures for Louisiana and found … nothing. All the uncertainty had remarkably little economic impact.

That should not make you complacent about the future of the Trump administration. Quite the opposite, in fact. First, the result may be specific to the southern United States. One of the best parts of a great paper is where they look for border effects with Mississippi. Mississippi didn’t get a Huey Long, but maybe markets thought that it might: the craziness was already priced in. If that’s the explanation, then the U.S. may be in a for sudden crash.

But that seems unlikely. (The paper uses multiple methods, all pointing the same direction.) What’s more likely is that you can’t trust the markets to discipline the a truly-erratic administration until it is too late. If you want to make sure that the Trump administration doesn’t wreck American governance  then you’ve got to act yourself and act politically.

Go see and join the debate at this post.

Worthwhile Canadian initiative rejected!

So the Trudeau government just gave supporters their first big disappointment: no election reform in this parliament. The stated reason is twofold. First, the Liberals feared that proportional representation might lead to the rise of fringe alt-right parties. Second, the government worried that a referendum decided by a simple majority would set a worrisome precedent for future secessionists, while a referendum with a bigger threshold would be impossible to win.

Neither objection is convincing. First, the Liberals could have gone for an Australian-style preferential voting system, which disadvantages small parties. Second, they could have designed a P.R. system to prevent small parties. (Either via a minimum threshold or holding elections in multi-member districts with only four or five representatives.) Finally, they could have gone with the higher referendum threshold with a clear statement that Canadians were voting only on the reform and that the government would not resign in the advent of a defeat. 

So what is the real reason? Well, the real reason is that the Liberals managed to turn 40% of the popular vote into 54% of the seats. That seems to have killed the desire for reform. But they are making a big mistake.

The below figure graphs Canadian vote shares since the turn of the last century. The parties are ordered (roughly) from most conservative at the top to most liberal at the bottom. The Bloc Québécois is much more left than the New Democrats, but due to their unique nature I have put them in the middle.*

And what does the figure show? Well, since 1945 the Conservative Party has been in power for 27 years but conservative parties only won a majority twice: 1958 and 1984. 

Proportional representation or preference ballots might be bad for the Liberal Party. They are unlikely to be bad for liberalism. To all extents and purpose, the New Democrats and the Greens are just slightly more left-wing versions of the Liberals. (See here if you do not believe me.) 

In other words, abandoning electoral reform seems like a very shortsighted move on the part of the Liberals. Is there something I am missing?

* Yes, I am aware that there is at least one Canadian reader out there prepared to be pedantic. Therefore, to clarify: I know that the New Democrats were called the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation before 1958, Social Credit ran under the name “New Democracy” in 1940 and split into two parties for the ‘65 and ‘68 elections, Conservatives were Progressive between 1942 and 2003, and the Reform Party was CRAP in 2000.

Culture wars in Mexico

In general, Mexican politics is not consumed by values or lifestyle issues. But there are signs this is changing.

Consider the bill that came out of the Mexican senate 73-0 restricting the use of reproductive technology to married couples. It would also restrict surrogacy to relatives of the genetic parents. The same bill just got out of committee in the Chamber of Deputies. Now, Mexico has same-sex marriage, but the bill limits the use of reproductive technologies to couples diagnosed as infertile. That is, of course, aimed at keeping same-sex couples from reproducing.  

Assuming that it passes, the courts could turn it into an effective dead letter. After all, being of the same sex is certainly an impediment to natural conception within six months, which is the bill’s definition of infertility. And it certainly is not exactly a big news item in Mexico. But a reaction to the blinding social changes of the last two decades is definitely out there. 

Robert Shiller is a genius, but ...

... this essay is just weird.

I mean, he predicts that there will be a movement to abolish nation states, not from some right-wing spectre of angry foreigners bearing down on the gates, but from citizens clamoring for more free-trade agreements, the demand for which will ... uh ... “stem from daily interactions on computer monitors with foreigners whom we can see are intelligent, decent people – people who happen, through no choice of their own, to be living in poverty. This should lead to better trade agreements, which presuppose the eventual development of orders of magnitude more social insurance to protect people within a country during the transition to a more just global economy.”

I mean, okay. Moral impulses prompted by electronic interactions with faraway poor people will lead to a popular groundswell that will both usher in an era of global free trade and increase social insurance transfers by a factor of ten. Even ignoring for a moment that OECD social spending is already at 22% of GDP and is therefore unlikely to increase to 216%, it is hard to see the theory of human behavior that causes people with sympathy for faraway poor people to demand more trade with them. 

The irony? Shiller has done so much to demolish the idiocy of using some imaginary homo economicus to set policy. But now, suddenly, homo economicus is back and plotting revolution in the most off-base essay I have read in a very long time. 

Filed under 2016 election for lack of a better place. After all, without the current election I would not have bothered to write this response. 

A European kludge to allow Scotmain?

The last post (quoting Callum’s Craic) pointed out the biggest problem with keeping Scotland and N.I. in the E.U. while letting the rest of the U.K. secede: who would control the U.K.’s representatives in Brussels? Sure, it is easy to say that they would come under the joint control of Edinburgh and Belfast. But in a country based on parliamentary sovereignty, that is hard to do. 

One solution is to cobble something together in the great British tradition: that is, have everyone sit down and agree that Holyrood (or Holyrood plus Belfast, in some weird joint operation) will control the U.K. seat on the European Council. That might satisfy the country’s European counterparts. Or it might not: after all, the British parliament could renege on the deal with a single vote. 

Thus, the second solution, proposed by Brendan O’Leary, would be to remove Britain’s seat on the European Council. Scotland could continue to elect representatives to the European Parliament, since those representatives, once elected, are not beholden to their home government. (The picture in the last post was taken behind the Parliament building in Brussels.) Similarly, Scotland could continue to choose one commissioner on the European Commission, since those commissioners, once selected, are also (supposedly) not beholden to their home government. The Council, however, represents home governments directly. If the Europeans refused to allow the U.K.’s council seat to be filled by a subnational body, then the U.K.’s council seat would have to go.

The problem with both solutions lies on the European side, rather than the British one. Since the Treaty on European Union specifically lists all the associated territories, rather than leaving it as only a broad category, then a treaty change will probably be required. That means unanimity on the European side. (In fact, even if treaty change is avoided in order to circumvent messy ratification referenda, unanimity would be required.) Spain is already likely to be a problem, if for reasons that exist only inside Rajoy’s head. Other countries may be equally reticent, for their own reasons.

Sadly, discussion over at A Fistful of Euros seems in deep freeze, part of the general decline of the blogosphere. I would love to know what the authors and commentators over there think about “reverse Greenland” and the survival of the U.K. after Brexit. What is the real prospect of a kludge to keep the U.K. united and England out?

Is there a very British kludge for Brexit?

This blog suggested that one way around the Brexit issue would be a brief treaty revision that declared England and Wales to be an “overseas territory” of the United Kingdom. That way, the U.K. government keeps a seat at the table  while England and Wales leave the single market. The half-Brexited U.K. would, of course, have its representation at Brussels reduced to reflect only the population of Scotland and Northern Ireland, but it would retain a national veto where one applies.

And therein lies the rub. As Callum points out on Medium: “With Holyrood being a subservient parliament in the constitutional order of this country, it can be overruled. Imagine a scenario where the E.U. wants to do a foreign policy initiative that the UK doesn’t want. London has reserved foreign policy, and Holyrood has no right to make foreign policy decision. Yet, Scotland sits on the council and has to vote some way in the council. Say, about sanctions against Russia, for instance. In theory, London could overrule Edinburgh, and force Scotland to vote for or against it. London would then have, indirectly, a veto in a club it didn’t belong to. The E.U. would, of course, have none of that, and wouldn’t accept this situation.”

One imagines that the U.K. could fudge this somehow. After all, this was the country that invented “responsible” self-government, dominion status and the Irish Free State. The question, I think, is whether there is a way that the U.K. can constitutionally make an ironclad guarantee to both Edinburgh and Brussels that Westminster cannot override Holyrood when it comes to voting in Brussels?

That, I think, is the needle that May needs to thread if she wants to keep the U.K. together without provoking a massive backlash from Brexit voters. Ideas?

Coups, public opinion, and broadcasting

The best book on coups is Naunihal Singh’s Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. It answers many of the questions I had earlier about the attempted coup in Turkey. Singh is at the Air War College in Montgomery, where I am visiting. The below picture is neither from Montgomery nor recent.

The book is excellent. And it answers two questions raised in my last post. First, seizing the means of communication is key. This is not because they are key in-and-of-themselves, but because controlling them is key to convincing all actors that the coup will succeed. The putschists in Turkey failed abysmally at doing that, even before Erdogan used his smartphone to make a videocall. 

Second, popular opinion does not matter. In Singh’s words: “Public opinion has no effect on coup outcomes. Once a coup attempt begins, military actors rarely consider the reaction of civilians to the coup, and their decision to support or oppose the coup attempt had nothing to do with which side had more popular support. Statistically, coups were no less likely to succeed in countries with governments that could be assumed to have reasonably high levels of support (countries with high economic growth, democracies or one-party regimes) than the opposite.”

Here is a good review. 

Thoughts on Turkey

 Turkey is in the middle of an old-fashioned military coup, in the same league as the 2014 one in Thailand. This is not at all like recent events in our hemisphere. Honduras in 2009 was a complex and confusing situation where the constitution failed to contain political disputes. Paraguay in 2012 was only a coup in the fever dreams of the Brazilian government; the impeachment likely violated the spirit of the constitution, but it adhered to the letter. A coup may happen in Venezuela, but it will be a result of a complete collapse of order. We do not do things this way in this hemisphere.

With the kids in bed (they are tired!) I am watching television. I think there is an interesting question about whether Erdogan’s ability to get out messages via the Internet has made a difference as to how the coup has unfolded. There is a research project there ... coup leaders always moved to seize the television and radio stations back in the day, but do we know whether such seizures mattered? Is there data?

There is another interesting question about conscript militaries. It is clear that conscript militaries can pull of coups; it has happened all the time. But do we know whether conscript militaries decrease or increase the likelihood of a successful coup given other factors, like education or the legitimacy of democracy (the latter being hard to measure).

Worth studying.

Oh, and Turkey is not the only Muslim-majority nation in NATO. (Sorry Rachel!) I spent a lot of time in the other and blogged far less about it than I should have. Ni modo, I was tired at that time in my life.

The U.S. would not have had a better constitution without the Revolution

Dylan Matthews’ third point in his screed about why the American Revolution was a mistake is that without the Revolution, we would have had a Westminster-style parliamentary government, and parliamentary governments are better.

I grant the point about parliamentary government. The U.S. constitution is a mess, at least as a governing document. It sets up multiple veto points and is quite unsuited to disciplined, ideological parties. The Canadian constitution, as it currently stands, works quite a lot better.

But the United States would not get the current Canadian constitution if we had not fought the Revolution.

Consider the Canadian constitution as it stood in 1867. It possessed this giant monstrosity called the Senate: an appointed chamber deliberately set up to represent the regions and throw sand into the legislative gears. And the Senate did just that! Occasionally, it rejected major reforms: in 1926, for example, the Senate axed Canada’s first attempt at a social security system. 

The Canadian senate, however, soon became remarkably deferential to the lower house. (For example, the failed 1926 social security bill sailed through unchanged the next year.) That is in part because the Prime Minister can appoint more senators, but mostly it is because the institution does not have the legitimacy to use its de jure powers to the fullest. It is not quite the House of Lords, but it’s close.

Now imagine designing a constitution for a British North America that includes a bunch of slaveholding states provinces. One might imagine that you would get an institution rather like the Canadian senate. But does anyone believe that politicians from the slave states provinces would hesitate to use every power at their disposal to protect their control? The end result would be an upper house that would be even more of a dog’s breakfast than our own.

And that assumes that you even get a united British North America without the Revolution! I will admit, it seems likely that the British colonies would eventually federate. But I mostly think that because Canada, Australia and South Africa eventually did federate, even if New Zealand and Rhodesia kept out of the latter two. Blind analogy is probably not a good reason to assume that British North America would go the same way.

Having North America divided into ... uh .... somewhere between 13 and 16 different autonomous entities under the British crown is not a recipe for good government. Give me the Senate instead of balkanization! Hell, give me the even messier constitutional wreck that is the European Union. 

In other words, claiming that North America would have had a better constitution absent the Revolution is ahistorical smoke blowing. Wasn’t gonna happen. 

Democracy is bad for capitalism?

 The answer is no, not really. But it is interesting that democracies show no sign of the Marxist definition of exploitation, whereas non-democracies do. 

In need a new tag for posts like this one.

Lee Alston on Brazil

Lee Alston, co-author of a great new book on Brazil, has an excellent piece on Brazil’s political crisis. 

He points out that so far the impeachment has been a good thing: markets have risen and Interim President Michel Temer is known as a “dealmaker” who can manage Congress.

But! Temer has a hard row to hoe. He needs to restore fiscal stability while retaining social inclusive policies: i.e., income redistribution that actually redistributes income and gives people a stake in their polity. How can we know whether he can do that? Well, take it from the source:

In Brazil in Transition, my coauthors and I pose three questions to help us assess whether a leader such as Temer has what it takes: does he know what policies are needed to recover from the shock? Can he coordinate a coalition that includes economic and political actors as well as citizens to embrace those policies? And is he trusted and does he possess moral authority?

Lee doesn’t come out and say it, but his tone is negative. (He even briefly feints in the other direction, sardonically pointing out that at least you have to admit that Temer isn’t afraid of controversy.) His conclusion:

His early moves may please markets, but to satisfy Brazil’s diverse citizenry, he will need to demonstrate that he is not abandoning social inclusion. On this as well as his own fate in the ongoing corruption scandals: the jury is still out.

As for me, well ... I think the list of questions is an excellent one. The answers to the three are maybe, probably not, and hell no. The jury is certainly out, but there are a lot of signs coming out of the box. 

Meanwhile, buy the book.

I don’t understand West Virginia

 I don’t understand western Virginia either, but that’s a post for another day.

West Virginia is in the middle of a budget meltdown from low commodities prices. The governor does not want to further tap the rainy day fund, which has $784 million. I can understand that. But I do not understand the politics behind legislators in a poor and racially homogenous state refusing to countenance any tax hikes. The alternative is “closure of eight State Police detachments and 87 trooper layoffs; 350 jobs eliminated across colleges and universities and closure of at least four community college campuses; and layoffs of 166 workers at state hospitals.”

The state Senate passed a series of taxes imposed on tobacco, driving and professional services: dead so far in the House. Where they are mulling a $100 million tax break for oil and gas, the same industry which created the problem. Tax revenue from coal and gas falls, so cut revenue further from coal and gas, in the hope that the industry comes back for a future increase in fiscal dependency on coal and gas. Huh?

I am astounded to say this, but West Virginia could learn from Ecuador. 

But the real question is: what’s driving anti-tax mania in West Virginia? Somehow I doubt that it’s Keynesianism, which makes little sense in the context of economies as open as the typical American state. And I have trouble imagining that voters can be bamboozled by slick campaign ads when they see cuts affecting services they need. So what’s going on?

Observatorio Argentino 30: Why Big Oil loves Kircherismo

 The first round of the Argentine presidential election threw up a surprise: the center-right mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, came within a hairs-breadth of Daniel Scioli, the candidate of the leftist ruling coalition. The result forced the election into an unexpected run-off between the two leading candidates. Macri is now believed to have a very good chance of winning the run-off tomorrow. Macri and Scioli are far apart on many issues. The markets, certainly, think that the election matters: Argentina dollar-denominated bonds due in 2017 jumped 10% on the first-round election results. The Merval stock market index rose almost 5%. Analysts have predicted an additional rally of as much as 30% if Macri pulls out a victory.

In other words, this election matters. And one of the ways it matters is in energy policy. But the way it matters is a little odd. Actually, a lot odd.

Short version: if you like big oil companies, then you should love Peronism! The Kirchners are the best thing for Big Oil since, I don’t know, the Iranian Revolution? 

Longer version: The Kirchner administration (2003-07) and the first half of the following Fernández administration (2007-date) did everything they could to make life difficult for the upstream sector, culminating the nationalization of Repsol YPF in 2012. Since then, though, the Argentine government has been running hard in the other direction, handing out windfall past subsidy to the upstream sector. (The government resolved the Repsol expropriation in a way that satisfied the oil companies.) In petroleum, those windfalls run pretty far downstream.

A bit more detail:

1. Argentina controls the oil trade. Exports are allowed only when the international price is below $77; imports are banned. When world prices were high, Argentine producers hated this. But now that world prices are low they love it: Argentine crude oil producers currently sell domestic crude similar to WTI for $85 per barrel at a time when their American counterparts are lucky to receive $42. As an added sweetener, whenever prices are below $81 ($66 for some fields) the government will hand them a $3 per barrel direct subsidy.
2. Argentina controls retail gasoline prices. In October 2015, Argentine gasoline prices averaged $4.96 per gallon. The pre-tax price averaged $3.00. (Calculated from data on page 79.) Argentine refineries paid an average of $77 per barrel. Well, the last time that crude cost $77 in the United States was November 2014, at which point American gasoline prices averaged … wait for it … $3.00 per gallon. In other words, the petroleum industry ain’t hurting.
3. Natural gas producers now get $7.50 per MMBTU for production from new sources. This at a time when the landed price of liquefied natural gas in Argentina is $6.77! Not too shabby. While we’re at it, Scioli, the left-winger in the race, has promised to raise the domestic price for new natural gas production to $12.50.

In short, the left-wingers in the Casa Rosada are in the midst of engineering a massive wealth transfer from Argentine consumers to hydrocarbon producers. ¡Viva Kirchnerismo!

So where is the populism in modern-day energy Peronismo? Electricity. Electricity prices have been controlled since the 2002 crisis. The government authorized a 72% rise in 2013, but that still left average retail prices around 1¢ (U.S.) per kilowatt-hour. At those prices, the only way to keep the lights on has been to pump public money into electricity generators and distributors. (See below; the 2015 figures are my estimates from Argentine nominal GDP data provided by a private consultancy combined with data on electricity subsidies for the first six months of the year.) They have been more successful than Venezuela’s monumental incompetents, but there have been growing brownouts and the utilities are facing bankruptcy despite the subsidies.

There are subsidies and they are not unaffordable … but like most electricity subsidy schemes, they benefit the middle class and the rich rather more than the poor.

Scioli would keep the hydrocarbon subsidy schemes in place. That would be awesome for oil companies. He would also likely keep the electricity subsidies in place for as long as the country can afford it. Which could be a long time, if he gets public spending in order elsewhere. It isn’t how I would spend the national fisc — and it begs the question of how you limit consumption in the absence of price signals — but it won’t arrive at Bolivarian levels of crazy for a few years yet.

Macri would scrap the upstream subsidies. His chief energy adviser is Juan José Aranguren, the head of Shell Argentina, and Macri has said that he intends to appoint Aranguren to a cabinet-level post if he is elected. Aranguren is long-standing critic of the Fernández administration’s energy policies. I’ve met the man — he has a refreshingly German level of bluntness about him — and I have little doubt that he will unwind the web of controls and subsidies.

Argentina being Argentina, this is one of the few cases around the world where an openly right-wing policy immediately redistribute billions of dollars downward. ¡Viva Aranguren!

Electricity policy under Macri is less clear. His political party, the Republican Proposal, has an in-house think tank called Fundación Pensar, and Fundación Pensar’s energy policy head, Sebastián Scheimberg, has publicly stated that electricity subsidies need to be removed. But that would hurt a lot of people very quickly, including a lot of poorer people. (Saying that the subsidies benefit the middle class and rich more is far from saying that they don’t also help the poor. They do. A lot.) And Macri got burned from a price hike during his time as mayor of Buenos Aires. Since punting and waiting for another opportunity to score is an option, then I think that is exactly what he will do. He might surprise with a social tariff, but I do not think it will be a priority. 

Happy election watching tomorrow!

Observatorio argentino 29: Cristina should root for Macri to win

 Consider: whomever wins the Argentine presidency is going to have to manage a rough transition. They are unlikely to come out smelling of roses. The blue market has lasted longer than I expected, in part because the government has made it fairly easy to get blue market pesos, but a devaluation is coming. Another commodity-price boom does not look probable. Inflation will have to be contained or run up to Venezuelan levels.

In short, the new president is likely to be less-than-popular when the 2019 election rolls around.

And who better to come back and take over from those repulsive reactionaries of the right? Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner! 

Which makes me want to ask better observers of Argentina: is there evidence that Cristina is not giving Daniel Scioli (her party’s candidate for president) the support that he might expect? I mean, it just seems so obvious and so Argentine ...

Worthwhile Mexican initiative ... undone!

 Mexico’s Peña administration reminds me a little of America’s second Bush administration: every time something good comes out of it they seem a little surprised and try to walk it back. For the Bush administration we have the examples of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 or the Energy Policy Act of 2005, both awesome ideas turned into dog’s breakfasts. (And later fixed, I should add.) For the Peña administration, we have the sugary soda tax. (Among other things.)

The Mexican congress passed the 10% tax on soda in 2013. Consumption crashed. Mexicans drank 163 liters of soda per year, 40% more than Americans. (Soda is one of the few products that Americans consume using the metric system, so I’ve left it in liters.) 

There was some debate about the effect of the tax. Would producers pass it on or would they absorb it? If they passed it on, how would consumers respond to a relatively small price shift? After all, inflation in Mexico has been running at about 4% per year for a decade, so consumers might just shrug off a 10% increase in prices as part of the inflationary background noise.* Or they might just jones their Cokes filled with genuine cane sugar so much that they suck up the damage.

Well, we found out. Consumption went down 12%. Awesome sauce! Excellent! So you would think that the tax would now be raised to the 20%-30% level.

Nope. The Chamber of Deputies just voted to cut it back to 5%. That sound is my head hitting my desk for the second time in a week. 

The bill went through on a vote of 423-33, but that doesn’t quite capture what happened. The soda tax cut was slipped into the overall revenue bill with no debate at all. Then a PRI-PAN alliance blocked any attempt to amend the legislation. 

But I guess it is okay because the PAN minority leader, Marko Cortés, tells us that the tax cut will only apply to low-calorie soft drinks.

Man, this is awful. Vote PRD, I guess. 

Bad Canadian coverage

 Earlier I praised the New York Times; now I bury it.

It should not be a shocker that U.S. coverage of Canadian affairs is pretty bad, but this one takes the cake. New York Times headline from today, page 12:  “Most Noticeable Change Under Trudeau Could Be Abrupt Shift in Tone.” Most of the tone-shifting the article discussed had to do with the tone inside Canada (or between Canada and countries not called the United States) so the piece was not a bit of American navel-gazing.

OK, fine. But what does the article say in paragraph 2?

“Mr. Trudeau has promised some major policy changes, among them legalizing marijuana, dropping out of the American-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State and deficit financing to pump up the economy and rebuild infrastructure.” 

Given that Mr. Trudeau has an outright majority in the lower house, these things are likely to happen. (Canada’s senate, thank the Lord, is not like the American one.) 

So let me say that, no, the tone is not going to be the most noticeable change under Trudeau. For crying out loud.

This was Politico-level bad.

Duverger’s law passed in Canada!

 Tonight, Victor Menaldo sleeps happy in Seattle. Not because he cares who won the Canadian election. Victor is from Queens and lives in Washington State; he is not entirely clear that Canada is a country. No, Victor sleeps happy because Canadian voters, in their infinite wisdom, upheld Duverger’s law, which is, in the words of Prof. Menaldo, the “one insightful rule” that political science has given to the world.

To recap, Duverger’s law states that democracies that vote by geographical district where the biggest vote-getter wins will have two-party systems. The reason is that voters won’t want to waste their votes on no-hopers, so third parties will struggle. If, for example, voters really hate one particular party, then they will vote for whatever second party looks most likely to defeat the hated one. They won’t want to risk having the evil ones win by wasting their vote on a no-hoper party, even if that party most closely fits their preferences.

And that is what seems to have happened in Canada! Defying the polls, left-leaning Canadians did not split their votes between the Liberals and the New Democrats. Rather, they broke Liberal at the last minute, handing an outright majority to that party. 

So now my friend Victor can sleep easy, knowing the Duverger has regained ground in England and seems to have proven itself in Canada. As a political scientist, his job is secure. 

At least until some damn bloody voters somewhere else decide once again to ignore the law. Man, political science would be easy if it weren’t for all those, you know, voters!

Dictators, revisited

 Four years ago this week, I had a debate with John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber. Briefly, he said that dictatorship was on the way out as a form of government. I sharply disagreed. Four years seems like a reasonable amount of time to circle back and ground-truth.

Here is the original post. Take a moment to click through, so that we’re all agreed on definitions. Good? Okay, then: Who are the world’s remaining dictators, and have their numbers changed since 2011? The 2011 list is below, with original comments in italics and 2015 updates in parentheses.

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979. There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies. (Dos Santos celebrated 35 years in power last year. NO CHANGE.)

Azerbaijan (NO CHANGE)

Belarus (NO CHANGE)

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s. (He rules still. NO CHANGE.)

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere. (He hasn’t gone anywhere. NO CHANGE.)

Chad (It’s still Idriss Déby. NO CHANGE.)

Congo Republic (NO CHANGE)

Congo, Democratic Republic: President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator — they’re both just 40. (And now they’re both 44. But otherwise, NO CHANGE.)

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel. (NO CHANGE.)

Djibouti (NO CHANGE.)

Equatorial Guinea: This is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course. (It’s still nasty. NO CHANGE.)

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes. (NO CHANGE.)

Ethiopia (Ethiopia’s long-term dictator Meles Zenawa died in 2012. However, his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, has been governing in much the same manner — centralized one-party rule with no public opposition or criticism. In May 2015 Ethiopia held parliamentary “elections”; the ruling party won 90% of the seats and its allies took the rest.  Ethiopia’s human rights record continues to be dire, and it looks like Desalegn has settled in for the long run. NO CHANGE.) 

Kazakhstan (NO CHANGE.)

North Korea (Supreme Leader Kim died in late 2011, and was replaced by his son, Supreme Leader Kim. NO CHANGE.)

Rwanda (NO CHANGE.)

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Kiir has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere. (And he hasn’t. Four years later, Kiir is a post-colonial African dictator in the classic style. But the country is in the middle of a civil war, and therefore by definition not stable. So ... CHANGE.)

Sudan (NO CHANGE.)

Syria: At least for the nonce — I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around. (And four years later he is still around. You can argue whether he’s a proper dictator, though, as he has now lost control of about half his country’s population and ¾ of its territory. I’ll give this CHANGE.)

Tajikistan (NO CHANGE.)

Turkmenistan (NO CHANGE.)

Uganda: To nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago. (And he’ll likely win a fifth next year. NO CHANGE.)

Uzbekistan (NO CHANGE.)

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now. (And, good grief, he’s STILL hanging in there at age 91. NO CHANGE.)

So, of 24 clear dictatorships in 2011, two have perhaps slipped out of that category — South Sudan is in the middle of a civil war, and Syria’s Assad has lost control over much of his country.

Did we overlook anything in our original list? Gambia has a good case: Yahya Jammeh came to power in a 1994 and shows no sign of leaving soon. So did Burkina Faso, but Blaise Compaoré fled at the end of 2014. Acting retroactively, that would make Burkina the third country to have left dictatorship since the original post. 

Have any new dictatorships been added? We would say yes, three. Two of these are pretty minor and one is not minor at all. The minor ones are Fiji and Togo, both of which I listed as borderline cases back in 2011. In Fiji, the Prime Minister operates within what looks like a British-style constitutional framework, but a permanent legislative supermajority, a hand-picked judiciary and an unfree press means he can basically rule at will. In Togo, President Gnassingbe has just won another “election” and looks good to stay in power indefinitely.

The not so minor one is Russia. Back in 2011 I said that Russia was authoritarian, but not a dictatorship. But in the last four years, Russia has become dramatically more illiberal, power has been ever more centralized, multiple critics and opponents of the regime have been prosecuted, imprisoned, or murdered outright, and the cult of personality around Putin has grown extreme. All of these things were just getting started in 2011, but they’ve moved very rapidly since. At this point we think it’s reasonable to call Russia a dictatorship.

We also have two new borderline cases. The small one is Burundi, where President Pierre Nkurunziza plunged his country into unrest after what looks to have been a power grab. He hasn’t established full control, however, so it’s not a dictatorship and looks unlikely to become one. The big one is Venezuela. A while back, we argued that the Polity IV database had jumped the gun by classifying the country a dictatorship. It still isn’t there yet — President Maduro does not rule by decree and he is facing contested legislative elections in December. But the trend since Chavez’s death has been sharply authoritarian. The government has banned opposition candidates, refused to permit foreign observers, and arrested opposition leaders. We hesitate to call it a dictatorship yet, however — partly because this trend is fairly recent, and partly because it is not clear how much power is really consolidated in President Maduro’s hands. The December elections should provide strong evidence one way or another.

In summary: two medium-size countries have fallen out thanks to ongoing civil wars. One small one has ousted its dictator. Meanwhile two small countries and one large important country have joined the club.

In other words, dictatorship does not seem to be on its way out as a form of government.

Final results in the Mexico congressional election

 The final results are in. They are not far off what the initial numbers implied. The PRI-Green coalition secured half the seats, so they will need to rope in one additional deputy to pass anything. (Article 142 of the Chamber of Deputy’s internal rules says only that the chamber will vote a second time in the event of a tie.) The Humanists failed to clear the bar. So did the Labor Party, which will take its seats for this Congress but will not contest the 2018 election unless the recounts go their way. 

One independent got in under the new rules: Manuel Clouthier. He was elected from Sinaloa’s Fifth District, the fightin’ Fifth! (Sorry.) It comprises the northern half of Culiacán.

Clouthier has an interesting political biography. His father was the PAN’s presidential candidate in 1988. The 1988 election in Mexico was blatantly fraudulent. Early results coming in from rural districts favored Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the left-wing opposition candidate from what became the PRD. Ministry of Interior officials feared the worst, panicked, and claimed that a computer failure prevented them from releasing preliminary results. A week later, the Federal Electoral Commission declared that the PRI had won with 51.7% of the votes, compared to 31.1% for Cárdenas and 16.8% for Clouthier père.

The PRI needed to legitimize the stolen election; otherwise it risked ignited a cycle of unrest. So it offered the PAN a backroom deal: the PAN would agree to the result and let the paper ballots from the election be burnt. In return the government would reform the electoral code, create an independent electoral institute, and alter the makeup of the Senate from two senators per state to four, with three seats going to the winner and one to the leading opposition party. (This is no longer how the Mexican senate operates.) 

As far as we know, however, Clouthier père would have opposed these deals. He refused to recognize the ‘88 result, instead appointing a shadow cabinet in February ‘89. He died, however, in a car accident in October of that same year. There are unattributed stories that Clouthier junior quit the PAN in disgust over the deal with the PRI.

We do know three things. First, Clouthier rejoined the PAN to become a federal deputy but quit again when the PAN refused to put him up for a Senate seat. (Context: until the 2013 political reform, Mexican legislators could only serve one term. By refusing to put him up for Senate, the PAN leadership explicitly told Clouthier that it did not want him around.) Second, in 2012 Clouthier announced that he would join AMLO’s should AMLO win the presidency. Third, Clouthier’s positions are almost cloyingly neutral, save a for a bit about reforming the tax code to let businesses deduct 100% of their expenses. 

In other words, he is a rich businessman son of a center-right politician with an emotional affinity for the left but an actual content-free platform, save for a (admittedly sensible) bit that would directly benefit him. It’s almost Filipino!

I am not sure that I would say that more such candidates would be of much benefit to Mexico. The U.S., yes, possibly. But as much as everyone in Mexico hates the parties, the country really is not suffering from a surfeit of party discipline or an inability to make cross-party deals. Other than giving an advantage to rich guys with built-in name recognition, I am not sure how allowing independent candidates is supposed to help. 

I am going to have to start talking about the other big independent win soon, I suppose. 

Colombian peso update

 Colombia did not redenominate its currency in 2014. The Santos administration says that the plan to chop three zeros off the money continues to be in play.

Short version of what happened: Congress resisted the cost and President Santos decided not to use his considerable legislative power to push the bill through. In February 2015 the country introduced a 100,000-peso bill, temporarily reviving the debate. But for the moment, nothing is in store. Given that Santos has a lot on his plate, I doubt it will happen for several years ... I would be surprised if it happens before the 2018 election.

Hope that helped!

Two parties leave this world, but neither really matters

 There seems to have been contradictory information on the INE website: the new threshold for a party to retain its official status is 3% of the vote.

Which means that two parties will likely not be with us in 2016. The Humanists are definitely out. (I suspect that this is a good thing.) The Labor Party is in trouble: the current count puts it at 2.91% of the vote This isn’t the first time that Labor failed to pass the bar: it lost its status in 1991, just a year after being founded, but regained it the next year. 

The same could happen this time; after all, it is relatively easy to register a party. Or its membership could disperse, moving over to Morena or the remnants of the PRD. Either way, I doubt it matters much; the P.T. has only been important in coalition with other leftist parties.

New update on the election

 Here are our latest projections, given the latest recounts:

And here are the projections from Milenio (with the caveat that their figures add up to only 499 deputies):

Soon we will know, but the overall gist is clear. The PRI-Green coalition looks to be just short of a majority, Morena did very well for a new party, and the Social Encounter people look to be here to stay. And the Citizens’ Movement did well, setting us up for a mother of all battles among the left as we approach the 2018 election. (AMLO v. Ebrard? I certainly hope so.)

The supply of Mexican political parties

 When I am in Mexico, I smoke more cigars than in the United States. In part, that is because my demand is higher: there are more places in which I am allowed to smoke, and since my family usually doesn’t travel with me, I have more time during which I feel free to smoke.

But my increased smoking is also supply-driven. It is simply easier to get a good smooth cigar, at least to my own personal taste. (I recommend Hoyo de Monterrey, but do note that in cigars as in music and wine, my preferences are rather plebian.) With more good cigars around, I smoke more cigars. 

To be honest, the demand reasons outdistance the supply ones. After all, there is a cigar bar right around the corner from my house in Washington, D.C. I could easily set up shop there are work away in a haze of smoke, especially during the summer. Hell, I could light up in the backyard. But I don’t.

The same principle applies to Mexican political parties. Voters might demand more parties because they do not like the existing options.

But institutional factors might also encourage more viable parties to be formed, which will in turn pull voters away from existing parties even with no change in preferences.

In Mexico, the law encourages party formation and provides the new parties with guaranteed resources. And so, more parties are formed. That pulls voters away from the big parties. The new parties disproportionately grab votes from the PRD and PAN for two reasons. (1) They make ideological pitches (an easy way to grab votes) and PRD and PAN voters are more ideological; (2) The PRD and PAN have less efficient machines than the PRI. 

Before I continue, let me make two points up front. First, I am proposing a hypothesis which I am not sure how to test. I have no doubt that some of the decline in major-party support is demand-driven, that is, comes from changes in underlying voter preferences rather than the proliferation of parties clamoring for their votes. Second, I am ascribing no normative value to this development: I doubt that Mexico would be better off under a stable three-party system. 

Here is how you establish a party in Mexico. First, you get a membership equal to 0.26% of the electoral roll. (You can find a continuously updated roll here.) That’d be about 226,000 people, spread over at least 20 states. You submit that list in January the year before an election. By August, you should have approval by the National Electoral Institute (INE). That gives you immediate access to an annual pot of money worth about US$258 million. (That is per year, not per election.) Each party automatically gets $8.6 million. The rest is divvied up per your vote share at the last election, but for that first period you get $8.6 million. You also get free 250 hours of radio broadcast and 200 hours of television. You do not need to worry about opponents’ broadcast access: private funding is allowed, but the parties cannot purchase additional radio or TV slots although bigger parties are allocated more airtime.

So the barrier to entry is fairly low. You can get your initial membership almost however you want; you can think of that as an investment to get access to the public funding revenue stream. 

Of course, you then need to win 2% 3% of the vote in the next Congressional election to retain your perks.* So you need an electoral strategy. You can try replicate the PRI’s machine, but that’s pricey. Easier to try to siphon off voters from the left or the right ... the Greens have grabbed the non-ideological populist spot. Or you can, a la the Humanists, come in with your own ready-made base of support.

Given that democracy only arrived in 1997, this set-up makes fragmentation seem almost inevitable, even if everyone in Mexico thought that things were going along fine.  Imagine what the Tea Party would look like under this system. They could try to contest the PAN primary, but that would be hard: it is a national presidential primary with the rules always in flux. Moreover, there are only limited primaries for lower-level candidates. (The link takes you to a very good but 2003 article by Steven Wuhs of the University of Redlands; a slightly more up-to-date analysis can be found here from Kathleen Bruhn of UCSB.) Worse still, the PAN limits primary voting to those who “have been sponsored for party membership by a current member, have taken a course in party doctrine, and have served an apprenticeship as ‘adherents’ before being accepted into active membership.” (Page 7.) Given that the PAN is already pretty centrist, that would make it very hard to tug the party to the right. 

Or you could just split off! Boom, the Social Encounter Party.

Ditto, the fracturing of the left. This is more ideological, but in Mexico it is easier to pick up your marbles and leave when the party takes a stance you do not like. Why should AMLO stick with a party that made a squishy compromise with the PRI (the Pact for Mexico) rather than strike out on his own? Boom, Morena.

And even the PRI will lose some to parties with a built-in voter base, who might decide they have more influence outside than in. (The PRI has moved away from open candidate selection.) Boom, Panal, with a built-in voter base from the unions.

Plus, of course, the inexplicable continuing success of the Greens, a party run as a cynical family business.

In other words, the slow breakup of the party system that Alejandro Hope noted may not reflect voter dissatisfaction at all. Rather, it may be an inevitable consequence of how Mexico finances its political parties. The situation is the opposite of my experience with cigars.

Thoughts? There is a good paper here, if you can figure out how to test the hypothesis.

* The law is somewhat confusing. A party needs 2% of the vote to receive any PR seats in the election, but it needs 3% of the vote to retain its status for the next election. Thus, the Labor Party will be able to seat its deputies in 2015, but the party will not be able to contest 2018.

The fragmentation of the Mexican vote

 Alejandro Hope pointed out the following dramatic statistic:

PRI+PAN+PRD, porcentaje del voto nacional 1997: 90% 2015: 60%

That is quite a change! So what happened? I punched up the data on Mexican elections from 1997 to date and got the below time series for elections to the lower house of Congress:

Start with the heavy black line. It shows the three-party vote share for elections to the lower house of Congress. That share has been in sustained decline since 2006.

One explanation might be the fragmentation of the Mexican left. To adjust for that, I added back the vote share gained by the Labor Party (which effectively functions as an adjunct to the PRD) and Morena (which is a recent spinoff.) The trend remains.

So I then punched up the vote shares of each of the three major parties and got an interesting result: the PRD and PAN have been losing voters, while the PRI is generally maintaining. In other words, the smaller parties are cannibalizing the traditional right and left parties rather than Mexico’s traditional ruling party.

This is interesting. And it is not consistent with the idea that the fragmentation of the political system is a product of general disillusionment: that, presumably, should have hit the PRI as well, especially considering as its approval ratings are in the toilet. 

What does that leave us? The following hypotheses come to mind:

1. Voters are disillusioned, but the PRI has a particularly effective machine;
2. Some other factor is causing smaller parties to proliferate and cannibalize the ends of the political spectrum.

Both of these might be true, of course. Or there may be a third. And hypothesis (2) is pretty vague. I have some thoughts on the matter, but first go read this.

The parties and the Bronco

 Election watching is fun, even when the elections are as inconsequential as these recent ones appear to have been. Let’s start with the party system. Below is a of the parties, put in “more-or-less” left-right order. I say more of less because some of these parties are really not easy to categorize.

From left to right:

Morena: The name is an acronym for the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional. The party is Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) pet vehicle. AMLO  ran for president in 2006 on the PRD ticket with a moderately left-wing platform. He lost to Felipe Calderón by a hair. Instead of accepting defeat, however, he mobilized mass demonstrations, denounced the new government as illegitimate, and organized a government-in-exile. The low came when López Obrador shouted “To hell with your institutions!” AMLO nonetheless took another tilt at the windmill in 2012, still with the PRD ... he lost with a respectable 31.6% of the total vote. After the election, for reasons which remain unclear, AMLO left the PRD and formed his own party.

PRD: What I’m calling the PRD is actually a coalition between the PRD and the Labor Party, but Labor is very much a junior partner so you don’t lose much by ignoring it. The PRD got shellacked by AMLO’s decision to form a new party. It also got wounded by the fact that it governed the state of Guerrero when the 43 student activists were kidnapped and killed. Add those two blows to the fact that the party currently has no natural leader, and a shellacking was to be expected. But there was also a third, the continuing strength of the ...

Citizens’ Movement: This party got started in 1999 as a sort of Mexican version of the Liberal Democrats: lefty but not too lefty. That did not last. The party followed López Obrador into the wilds of the post-2006 government-in-exile, but refused to join Morena in 2012. This did not please AMLO. The Movimiento Ciudadano has gained oxygen from Marcelo Ebrard’s decision to switch from the PRD. Ebrard was a popular mayor of Mexico City (although the Line 12 fiasco has dented his reputation) and many believe that he could have won the presidency in 2012 had the PRD nominated him instead of AMLO. 

In short, the left is split between López Obrador’s pet vehicle, the remnants of the PRD, and a social democratic party that appears to be trying to take on the mantle of the center-left. It is a mess.

Continuing to the right we have:

Humanist Party: I’m at a bit of a loss with these guys. It’s a new party formed by rural politicians from both the PRI and the PAN. It seems to be basically an agricultural interest group party ... and does not seem to be too long for this world since it did not clear the 3% election threshold needed to keep its official standing. 

PRI: This is big centrist gorilla of Mexican politics, an amorphous non-ideological blob descended directly from the old dictatorial ruling party. 

Green Party: Oh boy. The Green Party is not a green party. It supports the death penalty for kidnapping, which would shock other green parties, and it’s remarkably wobbly on LGBT issues. So green it is not. Nor is it much of a party. Rather, it seems to be more of a family business run by its founder, Jorge González. (His son now heads the party.) The Greens collect election subsidies, get involved in a remarkable number of corruption scandals, and seems to care little about environmental issues. It went into coalition with the PAN in 2000 and now works with the PRI ... and keeps managing to win votes.

Panal: This party was the wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers’ union run by Esther Gordillo. We discussed it here. President Peña arrested her in February 2013 on corruption charges — in interviews, former president Calderón seems a little defensive that he didn’t move against her during his term. Gordillo’s daughter and a grandson are still in the party; she may be gone, but the party still lives on a manifestation of the union’s power.

PAN: This is center-right grouping that beat the PRI in 2000. The PAN is internally divided. The divisions are mostly personal, but there is also a vague ideological split between social conservatives and economic conservatives ... with the latter further split between moderates and radicals. That said, the economic center of gravity of the PAN is somewhat to the left of the U.S. Republicans.

Encuentro Social: Mexico has experienced social change at blinding speed over the last two decades; same-sex marriage is legal in the D.F., Coahuila, and Quintana Roo. The D.F. has legalized abortion up to 12 weeks. Divorce rates are rising and sexual mores have flipped in what seems like an eyeblink. And so, we bring you the reaction! The Social Encounter Party is dedicated to stopping the scourge of same-sex marriage and abortion.

And there you have the basic panorama for the Congressional parties. 

There are also the state elections. There, el Bronco in Nuevo León has gotten all the attention as the first independent to win a Mexican state election. (That is because independent candidates were not allowed until this election.) I could not write this post without mentioning him, of course.

Mexican election explainer

 I have been traveling to Mexico. It’s election time! 

The midterm elections were held on Sunday. The results are not yet in, but we have enough data to make a prediction. 

Now, this is just our prediction here at TPTM: there is a strong possibility that the Green Party will win fewer seats. But it may be useful to explain why the final seat counts will not be known until a few days after the election.

Mexico’s lower house uses a mixed FPTP-P.R. system. 300 seats are allocated on the basis of FPTP geographical districts. An addition 200 seats are allocated by proportional representation. The initial apportionment of those 200 seats does not depend on the apportionment of the geographical districts: if your party gets 10% of the vote, you get 20 seats plus whatever districts you won.

So far, so simple. But there are three wrinkles. The first is that no party can use its P.R. seats to obtain a higher proportion of seats than its vote share + 8%. In other words, if a party wins 200 district seats with 32% of the vote, then it receives no P.R. seats: 200 being 40% of 500. (That said, a party can exceed the vote-share + 8% limit if it wins enough districts; those seats are never taken away.) 

The second is that parties can campaign in coalitions. The seats then have to be divided up inside the coalition. The PRI-Green coalition, for example, put up candidates in 250 districts: 192 from the PRI and 58 from the Greens. How many district seats go to which party makes a difference: the PRI cannot win more than 194 seats. (Once you throw out votes for independent candidates or parties that did not clear the 2% threshold, the PRI got 30.9% of the vote. 30.9% + 8% = 38.9%; 38.9% × 500 = 194.) Therefore it would be in the PRI’s interest to insure that the Greens get as many seats as possible. 

Our estimate above relies on an unofficial count giving the PRI 29.1% and the Greens 7.06% of the vote; it also assumes that the coalition split its district seats proportionate to each party’s share of the total candidates: e.g. out of the 158 district seats won by the coalition, the estimate allocates 122 seats to the PRI and 36 to the Greens.

The final wrinkle is that for the purposes of proportional representation Mexico is divided into five 40-member electoral districts of unequal size, while our calculations assume one big national district.  You can read about the system (in English) from the Mexican authorities here.

All that said, we should be pretty close. The upshot? The PRI does not have an outright majority, but it does in coalition with the Greens and Panal. A good result for President Peña. For Mexico, more mixed. More later, if there is interest, and quite possibly even if there is not!

Duverger’s law passed in England!

 I’m at a conference in California. (My boy is on the Mall with his uncle, watching the bombers fly low overhead. I would rather be there. “Shall we go to the airplane store and buy a B-24?” ) My colleague, Victor Menaldo, a Queens native currently resident in Seattle, bemoaned the state of party politics in the U.K. 

Victor: “Political science has given one insightful rule to the world and those damned Brits have to go and break it.” 

The rule to which Victor refers is Duverger’s law, which states that democracies that vote by geographical district where the biggest vote-getter wins will have two-party systems. The reason is that voters won’t want to waste their votes on no-hopers, so third parties will struggle.

Canada and India had already weakened the law, although political scientists could finagle them in by claiming both were characterized by regional duopolies, the exceptions being when one duopoly was replaced with another. (As may be the case in the recent Alberta election, for example.) But the damned U.K. persisted in having more than two major parties.

But now the voters have had their say, and they wiped out the third parties in England! (In Scotland, they appear to have wiped out the second party as well.) The Conservatives won 41% of the vote and 60% of the seats. Labor Labour got 32% of the vote and 39% of the seats. That is 99% of the seats between them.

As for smaller parties? UKIP got 14% and one seat, the Greens 4% and one seat, and the Lib Dems 8% and 6 seats. 

The first real question is whether the Liberal Democrats can survive. My guess is yes, they have a de facto duopoly in their surviving constituencies, but they have also hit their high-water mark. 

Consider the following data. Of 2.1 million Liberal Democratic votes across England, only 112,913 of them were cast in constituencies where the Liberal Democrat won. 95% of votes were wasted. Now, they remain competitive in many of the 47 constituencies that they lost, so their English voters may not decide the party is a lost cause. But they have been hit. And flip side of a potential return to office in 47 constituencies is that they are quite vulnerable in four of their remaining seats: to Labour in Leeds NW and Sheffield Hallam; to the Conservatives in Southport, Norfolk North and Carshalton and Wallington. Which means that they are vulnerable to a swing towards either party unless they can re-energize their base elsewhere.

Unless they can find a way back into government in 2020, then Duverger’s law predicts the long-term decline of the Liberal Democrats.

For UKIP, the numbers were even worse: of 3.6 million UKIP voters nationwide, only 19,642 voters cast ballots for the one winning candidate in Clacton: 99% wasted votes. Moreover, at least the Lib Dems have a history of showing that they can win outside their current 6-seat English redoubt. UKIP does not have that. 

Duverger’s law therefore predicts that the UKIP vote should melt down by the next election.

The same logic holds for the Greens. If Duverger’s  is correct, then they should have hit their high-water mark.

And of course the defectors should be going to the two major parties. So their share of the English vote should rise from 72%.

So let this blog take a risk and vote for Duverger’s! We say that England returns to two-party politics. (To be honest, I am actually doubtful that Duverger’s is correct, but I will take a stand for my buddy Victor!)

Hold us to account, readers! Or tell us why we’re wrong.

Interesting Canadian election!

 The New Democratic Party just won in Alberta. Rachel Notley will be the new premier.

This is not unlike the (old) Democratic Party winning in Texas. The Wildrose Party is as conservative as the Texas GOP. Meanwhile, the former ruling Conservatives may have had “Progressive” appended to their name but they weren’t progressive in any serious way.

I get the impression that the swing may have really been a vote against low oil prices. Alberta has been hammered far more than Texas. But I am not sure! Can anyone explain Albertan politics or point me in a good direction?

It is strange sometimes to wonder how my life might have been different had the Alberta job that I rejected in 1998 been on the table in 1997, before I got the offer from ITAM. I suspect that I would have taken it. I am very glad that I didn’t, but I have to say that I still wonder how things would have turned out. 

It is also strange to contemplate that Alberta would clearly be better off as part of the United States. Weirdly enough, the U.S. would also be better off with Alberta as a state. Simply put, Alberta would pay fewer taxes to Washington than it does to Ottawa, but the new state would still be a net payer into the federal system. Moreover, Alberta would be spared the economic problems that would come with independence; namely painful exchange rate choices. 

Tyler Cowen is a very smart guy but ...

 ... this is just crazy hyperventilation. 

For the last few weeks there have been three models in the running:

1. The Greek government is calling the Germans Nazis because they figure Grexit is coming no matter what and they want to get the populace riled up as a distraction from the disasters, or

2. The Greek government will cave so cravenly on the substance that they want to have it on the record books that they supplied some expressive goods for a few weeks’ time, namely insulting the Germans and claiming that the Troika is dead and buried, or

3. The Greek government is simply full of out-of-control, ideological maniacs.

Right now it is looking like #2 — however unlikely it may sound as a model of retrospective voting and intertemporal substitution — is closest to reality.  What the relevant legislatures will go along with, however, still remains to be seen.  Arguably the insults and posturing have narrowed the possible bargaining space by hurting feelings all around.

Seriously, Professor Cowen? There are several other options, you know. I really would like you to explain your logic. I still don’t understand why a Greek default would lead the ECB to sink their banking system. And if that’s what you think will happen, I still don’t understand why I shouldn’t consider that to be an expression of out-of-control ideology from a bunch of maniacs in Frankfurt and Berlin.

Help! I am honestly confused.

Here is a rather more sedate look at the same events.

Observatorio argentino 28: La cosa más rara en una historia ya rara

 By now I suspect anyone reading this is well aware of the Nisman saga in Argentina. For those of you who are not, Chris Hayes had a pretty good synopsis:

But that isn’t the weirdest thing. Nor are President Fernández’s weird rambling Facebook posts the weirdest thing. Not even her bizarre tweets are the weirdest thing. No, the weirdest thing, if correct, is a story for which I have not been able to find corroboration. According to Mercopress, when the House Foreign Affairs Committee announced that it would send a group of low-level staffers to Argentina to find out what the hell was going on, Ambassador Cecilia Nahon delivered an angry message saying: “Argentina will not tolerate any United States intervention in the investigation of prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death, and will consider any attempt as an interference in the country’s domestic affairs and a violation of Argentine sovereignty.”

If true, and I am not yet sure that it is, that would be an incredibly dumb response to a pro-forma investigation by a House committee. It makes it sound like they are worried. But if they are, then they should not show that they are. 

But then again, this is the administration of the president that publicly mocked the accents of her Chinese hosts when trying to whomp up investment from that country. So who knows? The political incompetence is interesting to watch ... but I have the luck to not be Argentine. I suspect I would feel more strongly about it if I were; there is a reason why the apocryphal Chinese curse is considered a curse. 

Inexplicable Japanese scandal

 Germany has a lot of inexplicable political scandals, simply because standards are so high. Japan, not so much. 

There is one recent Japanese scandal which does on its face indeed seem scandalous, even by the lax standards of this glorious hemisphere ... but which upon further investigation seems to be the opposite of a scandal.

Yoichi Miyazawa, the trade minister, got in some trouble last week because his people spent public money to frequent an S&M club. Meh. The amount was only $170. Of course it should not have been expensed, but neither should $170 in tickets for the Equalizer. 

But that’s not the non-scandal. The non-scandal is that Minister Miyazawa turns out to own 600 shares in Tepco. Tepco, you might recall, is the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And Miyazawa’s ministry would  ultimately be responsible for regulating Tepco. A clear scandal!

Well, maybe. Miyazawa owned those shares before the 2011 tsunami. 

In other words, after taking an 80% loss the Minister Miyazawa has held on to some flatlining shares. It does look bad, I will admit, and he should sell them. But a serious scandal this really is not. Or am I missing something?

Still going to bet on No

 The polls are still not pointing in the direction of Yes. And Sam Wang agrees! I think. Actually, I am not sure what Sam Wang thinks; he is a little cryptic when it comes to Scotland.

Slovakia and Scotland

 Over at Charlie’s place, a fellow named Cdodgson brought up the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia as an example of a  “peaceful secession from more or less democratic states which the people involved don’t regret and don’t want to reverse.” The context, of course, was Scotland.

The basic description is true. The Velvet Divorce was peaceful and the countries were more-or-less democratic. But the Velvet Divorce holds few lessons for Scotland. 

The history of the Velvet Divorce does however hold lessons for the Velvet Divorce: namely that it was a sleazy breakup of a perfectly functioning country that benefitted no one save the two politicians who arranged it and forced it through: Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Mečiar. Neither of them did their country any good, before or after the split.

Did the January 1, 1993, division of Czechoslovakia reflect popular opinion? Of course, the answer has no bearing on the benefit of small states or the morality of breaking up democratic polities, but it is interesting ... because it didn't! In 1991, polls showed only 9% of Czechs and 15% of Slovaks favored a split. (Page 252.) By December 1992, support had risen ... to only 36% of Czechs and 37% of Slovaks. 

Moreover, Czechoslovakia already showed a rather impressive level of decentralization: in 1992, the federal government controlled only 22% of public spending. (See Table 6.1.) An additional 0.5% of spending went through the federal government to the two states via federal grants. (Table 6.5.) It is true that fiscal grants from the federal government had dried up as an almost accidental response to de-communization. That might have annoyed some Slovaks ... only the polls didn't show it.

The deal was hashed out between Klaus and Mečiar with no popular input. Neither politico was a particularly admirable person. Both leaders refused to hold a referendum because they believed that they would lose.

A continuing federation would have eventually led to more fiscal transfers. It also would have ended Mečiar's ambitions. So Klaus threw out the poorer chunk of the country and Mečiar escaped the limits of the federal system. Win-win for them.

Did the split leave anyone else better off politically or economically? On the Slovak side, the answer is pretty clearly “no,” although the country managed to survive the Mečiar years. It came close to some ugly outcomes, though. (See Hungary for a bad but-still-not-worst-case example of the bullet that Slovakia dodged.)

Lose-lose for everyone else. Trade collapsed despite a customs union, and both countries went through a painful adjustment. (Page 60.) It worked out OK in the end, but at grave risk to democracy and the gratuitous sundering of a political community. The Czechs and the Slovaks certainly seem to feel that it was pointless: two decades later, only 41% of Czechs and 29% of Slovaks think the Velvet Divorce was the right thing to do. Given status-quo bias, those numbers are astoundingly low.

There is a value in democratic political communities. They bind people through something more than impersonal market exchanges. It is hard to see why they should be broken up unless they are turning undemocratic (which would include systematized ethnic discrimination) or have such histories of intercommunal hatred that they cannot be made to work without violence.

It may be the case that some members of a democratic community have so soured on the others that they wish to share none of the responsibilities of being in a community. But that is parochial and cramped.

To return to Scotland: the breakup of Czechoslovakia was nothing like the proposed breakup of the United Kingdom. It had no popular support (unlike Scottish independence), led to great economic dislocation for both new countries (unlike Scottish independence, which will likely have no impact on England), occurred in a situation of low fiscal transfers (unlike Scottish independence), led to a near-breakdown of democracy in one of the countries (unlike Scottish independence), and did not occur after several decades of divergent policy preferences (unlike Scottish independence). 

Comparisons between Scotland and Slovakia are best avoided, I think, unless the discussion is solely focused on short-term economic effects.

More on why Scottish secession does not mean Tory dominance of the U.K.

 Over at Charlie’s place, two fellows named Tim and Barry raised the old canard that Scottish secession will lead to unending Conservative control of not-as-great Britain. They were unconvinced by (or ignored) the evidence contained in the previous post. 

Are they right? After all, U.K. elections are decided using first-past-the-post. National vote shares matter only inasmuch as they translate into victories in individual constituencies. In the United States, for example, Democrats can win the national House vote by almost 2% and still lose the chamber, which is what happened in 2012. Is the U.K. similar?

Short answer: no. 

Longer answer: losing Scotland knocks Labor down to 217 seats, versus 306 for the Tories. Parliament shrinks from 650 to 591. That means Labor needs to capture 45 seats to outsize the Conservatives and and 79 to gain an outright majority.

Is that doable? Well, the way to find out is to look at Tory constituencies and ask how much of a swing would be needed to flip the weakest 45 and the weakest 79. If the required swing is huge, then the Tories would indeed have a lock on the 2015 election sans Scotland.

And whaddaya know? The Conservatives are facing at least 82 swing seats. See here and here and here. Translation: It won't take much of a swing to knock the Tories off their perch. The polls are already showing a 7-point swing even if Scotland walks away. If the Liberal Democrats remain the number-three party, then Labor will not a hard time putting together a winning coalition in 2015. The rise of UKIP, of course, is more worrying ... but only if it wins enough seats to put together a majority with the Conservatives.

To sum up: the U.K. parliament is more responsive to the popular vote than the U.S. House of Representatives. Even without Scotland, Labor would be able to win a parliamentary majority as long as it remains ahead in the popular vote. And right now, it is ahead in the popular vote in England and Wales.

This is amateur psephology, of course. I welcome data that shows why the above analysis is wrong. (And I think I now need a British Isles tag.)

If Scotland leaves the U.K., then the U.K. will not leave Europe

 If Scotland votes to leave the U.K., then Brussels has made it clear that it will also leave the European Union. Scotland would need to apply like any other potential member state.

But what about the rest of the U.K.? Would it vote to leave the E.U. without Scotland? Many observers are worried.

I do not think that they should be. 

The Tories will be up for reelection in 2015, unless there is a vote-of-no-confidence. That election will be weird. The Scottish government wants to wrap up the independence negotiations by March 2016, so Scots might still be able to vote in the U.K. election. 

That said, it would entirely reasonable for Parliament to disenfranchise Scottish voters before then. Would that swing the 2015 election to the Tories?

Probably not. I played with the crosstabs from this poll. Here are the results:

	Weight	Weight w/o Scotland	% Tory	% Labor	% UKIP
London	13%	14%	37%	36%	9%
South	32%	36%	35%	28%	21%
Midlands/Wales	21%	23%	37%	33%	15%
North	25%	27%	29%	48%	13%
Scotland	9%	--	18%	34%	4%
Total U.K.			33%	36%	15%
Without Scotland			34%	36%	16%

My general impression from the literature is that the district boundaries in England (I mean England England) generally favor Labor, even after the recent redistricting. So Labor is likely to win. Labor opposes holding a referendum on the European Union. That would make Brexit moot.

Moreover, my gut feeling, which could be entirely wrong, is that allowing Scotland to secede will kill Cameron and hurt the Tories at the election. After all, Cameron allowed the election to happen and Cameron took off the option of giving Scotland the powers of your typical Canadian province. So he really will be to blame.

Absent some sort of black swan, Labor will be more likely to win, and Brexit will be moot.

This analysis fails if the Tories pick someone popular to replace Cameron. But I have no idea who such a person would be.  

On the other hand, if the Tories pull off reelection, then Britain is likely out of the E.U. The above analysis, from this poll:

	Weight	Weight w/o Scotland	% Brexit	% E.U.
London	13%	14%	34%	50%
South	32%	35%	42%	37%
Midlands/Wales	21%	23%	45%	37%
North	24%	26%	39%	40%
Scotland	9%		30%	65%
Total U.K.			39%	41%
Without Scotland			40%	39%

Any Cameron-replacement is likely to demagogue the Europe issue and the voters south-of-the-border will be pissed. The momentum will be towards withdrawal and the polls will likely move that way.

But I would bet against a Tory election victory in the wake of Scottish secession, and thus against Brexit. Investors and bankers relax! The Labor Party will save you.

On the other hand, I think that the Spanish government is going to be much bolshier about letting Scotland in than I did a few months ago … they won’t veto, but they will drag things out, and Scotland is going to hurt. 

I will still bet against Scottish secession

 There was that shock poll, yes. But we saw something similar in the Mexican presidential campaign. The official stance of this blog is unchanged. Although the gap is closing, we would still strongly bet against a Yes vote for secession. 

Calling Sam Wang!

Anyway, there is another discussion to be had about whether Scotland should secede. Charlie Stross tries to draw some conclusions about the general desirability of small states here; I show incredulity and confusion about his argument here and here. 

Sadly, Charlie has disabled Livejournal commenting, but I would encourage more participation, if only to help me understand what it is exactly that he is arguing.

The left-right distinction may not make sense, but this argument certainly does not

 Crispin Sartwell has an interesting critique of the left-right distinction in The Atlantic.

I think he’s right that the left-right distinction doesn’t make sense. I also, however, think two other things. First, it doesn’t matter. In extremis the distinction is meaningless. In practice, however, that means nothing. At any given time, political coalitions do make sense. Burkean conservatives may switch sides, as would egalitarians and democrats and cultural conservatives and the supporters of entrenched power. I am not sure why we should care that these coalitions change over time.

More importantly, Sartwell completely loses all credibility when he writes this: “The welfare state is more pervasive now than it was a century ago, and we now have institutions like compulsory public education. These are achievements of the left, programs they are still trying enhance, but have they actually resulted in more equal societies? Quite the contrary, I believe: They have led to ever-more-frozen hierarchies. The mainstream left is a technocratic elite, with a cult of science and expertise and an ear for the unanimous catchphrase. This is anything but a meritocracy; it an entrenched intergenerational class hierarchy.”

There are two problems with this paragraph. The first is when he claims that public education has not resulted in more equality. That is simply false. Goldin and Katz are the go-to resource here, but I challenge Prof. Sartwell to produce evidence that the expansion of public education has been inegalitarian in any country in any time period. 

The second problem is in the penultimate sentence. I believe him that so-called meritocracies lead to unfair inequality: I am a great believer in the Rawlsian veil of uncertainty. (How could I not be, given the wide range of outcomes in my own immediate family?) But the reference to a “cult of science”  is bizarre and gives the game away. He wants you to believe that expertise is a meaningless social construction. To add insult to injury, he wants you to believe in an “ear for the unanimous catchphrase” without defining what that means or providing evidence that it exists. Me, I have no idea what he is talking about, although it sounds like a bad thing. Which is his rhetorical point.

It gets worse. Sartwell’s next paragraph is: “Whatever the right is, it runs aground in contradiction similarly in its treatment of its own sacred concept ‘liberty,’ which is hard to hold in solution with opposing gay marriage or marijuana legalization, or with a thousand dimensions of the contemporary surveillance/security state.”

Sartwell could explain that liberty is incoherent, in the sense that a poor person is not free. But he does not. Rather, he takes a rather boringly conventional libertarian stance.

So ... he believes that public education has not increased equality, that expertise is meaningless, and that old-fashioned conservatism is stupid.

And I call bullshit. Sartwell is peddling garden-variety yawn-inducing libertarianism. Either that or his essay was badly composed. I am sympathetic to that problem! My own blog writing is generally badly-composed, although I would be more careful if asked to write for The Atlantic.

Am I wrong? I am happy to be schooled, including by Prof. Sartwell himself. (I deliberately refrained from googling his name before writing this; all I know is what is in the article.)

UPDATE: Googling has now occured, what with the Bosnia-Nigeria game not being as interesting as the earlier two matches today. Here is Sartwell’s blog. It is ... uh ... I am not sure what to say. 

Why Panama did not follow through on its threat to the Bolivarian Republic

 Panama-Venezuela relations remain at an all-time low because of the money that Venezuelans owe Panamanians. Venezuela’s capital controls are the reason the debts have not been paid. Panama responded in three ways. First, various forms of moral suasion, which are continuing but useless against the Maduro administration. Second, a case at the WTO, which is continuing but very slow. And third, a threat to publicize the moneys that corrupt Venezuelan officials have hidden in Panama ... which has sunk like a stone and disappeared.

Via Randy McDonald comes the likely reason: wealthy Venezuelans are continuing to move to Panama. Some of them are assuredly hiding money from the Venezuelan government, ill-gotten or not. Moreover, banking secrecy is the kind of thing that it is hard to half-violate without spooking clients from elsewhere. And, finally, the fact is that if the Maduro administration were going to respond to the Panamanian threat it would have already responded. Since Panama has no other real arrows in its quiver, it loses no credibility from not following through on its threat.

Plus, there is a new administration in Panama, from one of the two opposition parties. It is not bound by statements from the previous presidency. Venezuela is a scary place and an economic wreck, but it is a wreck in a very Venezuelan way. Panamanians rightfully discounted attempts to frighten them into thinking that the (conservative) opposition would create such a mess at home ... although President-elect Varela does intend to impose price controls on food. 

We will continue to bring you more news in the Panama-Venezuela spat as it continues.

Observatorio argentino 25: How many constitutions has Argentina had?

The Economist drew attention to two interesting articles on constitutions and constitutional reform: one paper by Gabriel Negretto of CIDE and another paper by Jose Luis Cordeiro.

The two papers have very different definitions of what it means to replace a constitution. Cordeiro, for example, dates Argentina’s constitution to 1853. (Page 6.) Negretto, on the other hand, dates the current constitution to 1994. Who is right?

Negretto uses two definitions for a “new” constitution. First, did the framers claim that it was new? Second, in cases of doubt, were the changes enacted by a constitutional convention?

The first definition is a problem for Argentina. You can find popular references to the “Constitution of 1994,” but the callers of the constitutional conventional of 1994 were very explicit that the purpose was to amend the existing constitution. In fact, the text of the Congressional resolution calling for the convention starts with: “It is declared necessary the partial reform of the national constitution of 1853 including the amendments of  1860, 1866, 1898 and 1957.”

It should be noted that all of the above-mentioned reforms were passed by means of constitutional conventions called by Congress.

Moreover, it should be noted that there was no way to change the Argentine constitution without calling for a convention! Here is a translation of Article 30 of the constitution as it stood before the 1994 reform: “The Constitution can be amended in all or some of its parts. Congress shall declare the need for reform by a two-thirds vote of its members; but no amendment shall be carried out without a Convention called for that effect.”

As for the 1994 reform, they held elections to the required Convention on April 10, 1994. Congress set out the terms of the election in Article 10 of the resolution calling for the amendments. The Peronists received 37.7% of the vote and 44.6% of the seats; the Radicals got 19.9% of the vote and 24.6% of the seats. (See page 26.) The convention then put meat on the bones of the reform that Congress had passed.

It seems to me that Argentina is still governed by the Constitution of 1853 and has, in fact, amended its magna carta rather less than us Americans.

In short, Negretto is wrong. Oh, he is right by his own definition ... but that definition implies that the only way to amend the Argentine constitution is to replace the Argentine constitution. Since the Argentine congress can and does constrain constitutional conventions, that does not seem to be a reasonable definition.

I do not know enough about the other cases in his data set, but I would worry that his results depend on similar arbitrary definitions.

Another tear-out-your-hair moment from the Economist

Maybe I should not have recommended the essay on democracy. I read it while playing with my boy. I am re-reading it now. And it has this:

“Plato’s great worry about democracy, that citizens would ‘live from day to day, indulging the pleasure of the moment,’ has proved prescient. Democratic governments got into the habit of running big structural deficits as a matter of course, borrowing to give voters what they wanted in the short term, while neglecting long-term investment. France and Italy have not balanced their budgets for more than 30 years. The financial crisis starkly exposed the unsustainability of such debt-financed democracy.”

WTF? No no no no no it has not! Both countries have entirely sustainable debt loads. Even given that they have abandoned their own currencies they have sustainable debt loads.

What in the name of God is the author talking about? The essay is a weird mash. Lots of good points, some subtle, with the occasional bizarroland statement that reads like it was tossed out there to make sure the Tories (and Republicans) keep reading.

By the way, Alex Harrowell, we still need you.

And the Economist crazily says Cristina Fernández is just like Putin!

The Economist this week has an interesting essay on democracy. It ain’t bad. I recommend reading it. But it also has this insane part:

“This postmodern tsar has destroyed the substance of democracy in Russia, muzzling the press and imprisoning his opponents, while preserving the show — everyone can vote, so long as Mr Putin wins. Autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have followed suit, perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than doing away with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.”

What the f--k? We have already presented the evidence that Venezuela is still democratic, albeit barely. That said, the comparison with Russia isn’t unfair.

But Argentina? Seriously? For real? Is there doubt that Argentine elections are free and fair? No. Is there doubt that the Peronistas would leave office if they lost an election? No. And if you don’t believe me, take the word of the same people who lumped Venezuela with Ethiopia. They give Argentina a polity score of 8. That is the same as Belgium and the Czech Republic, and twice Russia.

It is a headscratcher of a sentence. What was the author thinking? Or is it just cool for Economist writers to parrot Newt Gingrich?

The Monkey Cage goes slatepitchy on political polarization

The Monkey Cage was an awesome group blog. It brought serious political science research into the mainstream. It was all good.

And then it became part of the Washington Post.

Which gets us to an odd series of posts that attempts to convince the reader that American political polarization ain’t so bad. We can start with a post entitled “Gridlock is bad. The alternative is worse,” by Morris Fiorina of Stanford. Great scholar, great work ... but the argument is strange.

First, it assumes that the political parties would behave as they currently do under a more parliamentary-like electoral system. That makes no sense. One overreach followed by electoral disaster and that would be the end of that.

Second, to make his case that the parties left unfettered would do crazy things he writes, “The 2012 Republican platform plank stated essentially: never, no exceptions. The Democratic platform plank stated the opposite: any time, for any reason.”

Hmm. The GOP platform wrote:

1. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage (page 14);
2. Prohibit the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion;
3. Criminal penalties on healthcare providers who fail to provide treatment and care to an infant who survives an abortion;
4. Ban sex-selective abortions;
5. Protect from abortion unborn children who are capable of feeling pain;
6. We urge enactment of pending legislation that would require parental consent to transport girls
   across state lines for abortions (page 34);
7. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception (page 36).

Not a platform that I would support! And I would agree that point (5) effectively bans all abortions. But I would, no? Read objectively, this is to the right of median public opinion, but it is not off the charts. Of course I believe that it’s folderol, given the enthusiastic anti-abortion and anti-contraception actions of GOP-controlled state legislatures. But it sure is a sign that the national party understands the dangers of getting too far out in front of public opinion.

And the Democrats? Even less:

1. The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay;
2. President Obama overturned the “global gag rule,” a ban on federal funds to foreign family planning organizations that provided information about, counseling on, or offered abortions;

And that’s all she wrote.

So where does Fiorina’s characterization of the party platforms come from? You got me. He is a great scholar with a great book on polarization. But this was not written as a serious post. It has a slatepitchy feel: let’s devil’s advocate against the conventional wisdom. That has a place, I have been known to do it myself ... but it belongs not on the Monkey Cage that I used to love.

A worse post is Rob Ford’s “In America, polarization is a problem. In Britain, it could be a solution.” (This is the Rob Ford of the University of Manchester, not the other guy.) I have much to say about this, but I would rather make a public call for Alex Harrowell to come over here and fisk it for us. I will say simply that even if Ford is correct (Alex, we need you!), then I am not convinced that you have a problem if the only by-products are falling voter turnout and the rise of a rather silly buy aggressively anti-racist bunch of twits.

Now, as befits that great nation, the Canadian entry into the series is sober and serious. Richard Johnson of UBC limits himself to pointing out something that non-Canadians may not have realized: Canadian parties have become more polarized, whereas Canadian voters have not. That is the Monkey Cage I used to love: rigorously confirming the conventional wisdom (as AFAIK the above is the conventional wisdom in Canada) is a worthwhile initiative, Canadian or otherwise.

Anyway, earlier posts in the series are not slatepitchy, and some in fact argue against the American and British arguments mentioned above. And I do not want anyone to take this as a criticism of Fiorina or Ford. Like I said, I have done the same thing. And many counterintuitive pitches are indeed correct. But these two are odd.