Mario Guerrero

The following guest post is from political scientists Ora John Reuter and David Szakonyi

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Foreign policy pundits have been bullish about the ability of social media to bring democratic change in authoritarian regimes. Observers have argued that social media can literally “make history” by helping topple regimes, and democracy promoters are sinking big money into a variety of trainings with this very goal.   But in countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, where users of local social networks still far outnumber users of Facebook and Twitter, authoritarian governments have used their leverage over domestic networks to contain online opposition to the regime.

The story of Russia’s most popular social networking platform, VKontakte, illustrates this point well.  In March 2013, reports (ru) surfaced about how VKontakte collaborates with Kremlin officials to gather intelligence on opposition groups that use the site.  The most damning of the reports claimed that the site shut down opposition “groups” and misdirected message traffic between opposition figures.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the December 2011 parliamentary elections, when allegations of massive electoral fraud brought tens of thousands of Russians onto the streets in the largest anti-regime protests since the fall of the Soviet Union, the relationship between VKontakte and the Kremlin even became coercive. Four days after the election, the company’s founder Pavel Durov reported that he had been summoned by the FSB (Russia’s internal security service) to answer questions about opposition activity on Vkontakte. Durov’s hesitation to cooperate fully appears to have landed him in hot water, as investors with ties to the Kremlin recently purchased a 48% share in Vkontakte and Durov may have fled the country after his home was searched in connection with an alleged traffic violation.

In our research on social media, we have found that the ownership structure of social media matters greatly for politics. When nondemocratic governments have leverage over the content and structure of social networks, users lose the ability to access independent points of view and learn about government malfeasance. Not only is information sharing monitored and potentially blocked, but democracy activists avoid networks connected with government authorities for fear of reprisals.

Though scholars have long warned about the attempts of authoritarian leaders to influence the internet, little empirical evidence has been brought forth about the effects of these efforts on politics at the micro-level. In a forthcoming article, we used survey data from the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia to examine how usage of different social networks affected users’ awareness of electoral fraud. Our results indicate that users of Western networks like Facebook and Twitter are about five percentage points more likely to believe that there was significant electoral fraud during the elections.  Usage of Russian networks, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, meanwhile had no effect on awareness of electoral fraud.

We argue that the reason for this discrepancy lies in the type of information being spread on these networks. During the election season, local networks’ vulnerability to state pressure seems to have led many opposition activists to focus their social media strategy on Western social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are much harder to monitor and pressure.   Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most popular political blogger, maintained an active public Facebook page and Twitter account, which he used to spread hundreds of YouTube videos, photographs, and anecdotes documenting electoral fraud, and yet Navalny maintained only a token presence on Vkontakte and no presence on Odnoklassniki.  This strategy is at odds with the goal of reaching a mass audience since Odnoklassniki and VKontakte each have five times as many users as Facebook (only 5% of Russian internet users are on Facebook).

Caption: Figure 1 shows the week on week change in activity on social networking sites in the weeks surrounding the elections.  There were large spikes in activity on Facebook and Twitter, but no such spikes in VKontakte and Odnoklassniki usage.

Of course, it’s possible that individuals with preformed opinions about electoral violations select into usage of Facebook and Twitter and eschew usage of native social media platforms. Its hard to dismiss this possibility, but our findings do indicate that Facebook/Twitter users are remarkably similar to VKontakte users across a range of factors that might be correlated with perceptions of electoral fraud (sex, income, education, place of residence, support for Putin, levels of political participation, and support for the opposition).

Our presumption was also that Facebook and Twitter usage would also increase levels of protest participation, as the emerging narrative suggests.  This should certainly be true if the self-selection process described above was at work (users with preconceived notions about rampant fraud should be especially likely to join protests against electoral fraud).   But surprisingly, we found no relationship between usage of Facebook/Twitter and participation in post-election protests.

Thus, users of Western social networks were not more politically active than either their counterparts on Russian social networks or even non-users of social networks. Yet they were more informed about the wrongdoings of the government.

Our findings corroborate a slew of recent work that emphasizes an information-centric view of social media, rather than one geared towards organizing collective action. In a clever field experiment, Catie Snow Bailard (gated) randomized free access to Internet cafes in the run-up to Tanzania’s 2010 election. Again, Facebook users were more likely than the average Internet user to think the elections were conducted unfairly.  This finding aligns with recent work done by scholars on thousands of tweets emanating from the Occupy Wall Street protests in Greece, Spain and the USA. They find that online social media are used less for protest organization than they are to spread information about the grievances

What this discussion suggests is that social media’s effects on democratization are not straightforward. The information spreading function of social media is limited when most of a country’s online social networking occurs on domestic platforms that are vulnerable to government pressure, as is the case in a clutch of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes.  Indeed, one might speculate that one of the reasons that Russia was able to overcome its protest movement was that it was able to contain and control online dissent, while Egypt, which had no domestic social network, was unable to control the spread of information on Facebook and Twitter.  But a note of optimism is warranted:  Facebook is on the march. Just three years ago domestic social networks still dominated in much of the developing world, but the list of countries where Facebook is not dominant grows smaller every year.

 

 

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (±9.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change.

From this piece by Lars Hall and colleagues.  It is connected to their broader research agenda on choice blindness.  It’s a pretty striking result, though one wonders whether there is any real-world analogue to the experimental manipulation they carried out.  And I’d like to see what kinds of conditions might affect subjects’ ability to detect the manipulation.  Regardless, I thought this was interesting.

The good folks at Handsome Atlas have scanned the entirety of the 1880 Statistical Atlas of the United States, and look what's in there:
No, that's not from David Leip. That's a very detailed, county-level map of the 1880 presidential election results, published in 1889. (The abstract contains similar maps of earlier elections, as well.) Not only does it show which party won each county, but it also shows the intensity of the vote using gradient shading. This may just be the earliest geographic depiction of American election results -- please let me know if you know of earlier ones.

Why might people have suddenly become interested in geographic maps of election outcomes at this point in history? I was just speaking with Susan Schulten on this topic (she introduced me to the website and is a great curator of awesome political maps) -- here's her take on it. But one thing that I was thinking is that the 1880s was a period of rapid change in political campaigning styles. As chronicled by the likes of Daniel Klinghard and John Reynolds, this period saw a sharp increase in the number of candidates interested in running for office at all levels, and it also saw the rise of candidate-centered campaigning. For the first time, it was considered acceptable for candidates to aggressively seek office on their own, rather than just be spoken about in the third person by their backers and party leaders. A map like the one above would have been very useful for such ambitious candidates, helping them allocate their resources strategically.

Anyway, cool stuff.

From p. 213 of the book, “After the Music Stopped” (blurbed on cover as “A masterpiece—simple, straightforward, and wise”—President William J. Clinton), by economist Alan Blinder:

On December 19, the ultraconservative President Bush let pragmatism trump ideology and tapped the TARP for multibillion-dollar bridge loans to both GM and Chrysler. . . .

“Ultraconservative” . . . isn’t that a bit strong. I think we can all agree on “conservative.” And, to the extent that you believe Bush didn’t handle the economy well, you could add “incompetent.” But “ultra”conservative? That sounds a bit strong.

We welcome this guest post from Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute.

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May 2013 is only half over, but it has been an eventful month for same-sex marriage legislation: Rhode Island, Delaware, and Minnesota all legalized same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states with such laws to 12. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn called on the state House of Representatives to send him a law legalizing same-sex marriage, which he says he will sign. This burst of legislative movement, coupled with increasing numbers of polls showing majority support for same-sex marriage, makes it is easy to forget that until recently, this debate—and many public opinion polls—included civil unions as a viable third option. Now, many states that, like Illinois, legalized civil unions in the past decade appear to moving toward same-sex marriage.

Why have civil unions lost momentum? Examining the changing size and composition of civil union supporters provides a useful metric for understanding how the center of gravity has shifted in the same-sex marriage debate. Over the past decade, the number of Americans who prefer civil unions over either same-sex marriage or no legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships has declined significantly – and while in the past, this group was composed primarily of political moderates, today it’s dominated by conservatives.

Less than ten years ago, a substantial number of Americans believed that gay and lesbian relationships should be recognized, but held reservations about marriage. This group gravitated toward civil unions as an acceptable middle ground. In 2004, civil unions were significantly more popular than same-sex marriage, with roughly one-third (32%) of the public voicing a preference for this option, while approximately 1-in-5 (21%) supported same-sex marriage. Until very recently, it was also the preferred option for Democratic politicians. In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry endorsed civil unions while remaining opposed to same-sex marriage. Four years later, Barack Obama adopted a similar approach, which he held until mid-2012, when he announced that his views had “evolved” to support same-sex marriage.

As a result, most public opinion polls a decade ago also included civil union measures, either as the middle option in a three-part question or as a standalone question separate from same-sex marriage. As the public debate over same-sex marriage changed, however, advocates on both sides increasingly emphasized a binary choice of support for or opposition to same-sex marriage. As public support for same-sex marriage has grown, particularly over the past four years, many Democratic candidates have shifted their position from support for civil unions to support for same-sex marriage, while Republican candidates generally have remained opposed to any legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships. In response, some polling firms such as ABC News and Quinnipiac have stopped asking about civil unions, with the assumption that opinion was polarizing into two opposing camps.

But are attitudes really polarizing among the public? If so, we would expect an evacuation of the civil union category as the culture war battle lines became more brightly drawn. The empirical evidence, however, does not bear this out. While opposition to any legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships has declined by nearly 20 points over the last nine years (from 44% in 2004 to 26% in 2013 in a three-part question), support for civil unions has fallen by only eight points (from 32% in 2004 to 24% in 2013). In fact, PRRI’s most recent survey (April 2013) found that roughly as many Americans support civil unions (24%) as say that there should be no legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples relationships (26%).

During this time, the composition of civil union supporters has been transformed. In 2004, only 3-in-10 (30%) civil union supporters identified as politically conservative, about half identified as political moderates, and another 20% identified as politically liberal. In 2013, a majority (52%) of civil union supporters are conservatives, while 29% are moderates, and 14% are liberals.

The changing political composition of civil union supporters shows that the center of gravity of this debate has shifted significantly. The civil union option has moved from being a middle way dominated by political moderates a decade ago to one that is, today, most attractive to political conservatives. And looking ahead, there is evidence that the civil union option may have a limited future, at least if younger Americans are any indication. When given a three-way choice, civil unions are the least popular option among Millennials (Americans born after 1980). Only slightly more than 1-in-10 (13%) Millennials prefer civil unions, while 67% say they support allowing gay and lesbian people to marry, and 15% oppose any legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.

Niall Ferguson is a history professor who also gives paid lectures, including a notorious recent event where he made an offhand commend dissing John Maynard Keynes for being gay, marrying a ballerina, and talking about poetry. Ferguson later characterized his own remarks as “stupid.”

I blogged a bit about this already, but I just wanted to repeat one point, after reading a couple of comments by some observers who, I think, misunderstood his remarks, taking them more seriously than was appropriate.

Tyler Cowen wrote:

For all of the brouhaha over Niall Ferguson, everyone is forgetting what Robert Skidelsky wrote in 1977, Skidelsky too it seems. I don’t agree with either the immigration study or with Ferguson (at all, in either instance), but the response has been a case study in…something or other. There is a glee and also a selectivity to it all which I am uncomfortable with, to say the least.

and this from Eric Alterman:

The best reason to doubt the sincerity of Ferguson’s retraction, however, is his complete lack of any compelling explanation of why he would wish to say such a thing in the first place. He was not drunk or high or on pain medication or even careless in his wording. None of the reasons that can sometimes lead us to say the opposite of what we mean—save perhaps mere sniveling hypocrisy and dishonesty—can be said to apply in this case.

I think the key is this bit from Oliver Berkeman (quoted by Alterman):

There are really only two options. One is that Ferguson didn’t believe what he said, but just says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear; the other is that he believed it then and still believes it now.

I think it’s mostly the first option. Of course Ferguson says what his audience wants to hear. That’s part of being a public speaker. The trick is to avoid going over the line and saying something that you do not believe. Here’s a simple (but, I think, not unreasonable) model. Suppose you believe 25 things and you have time to say 10 things. Then you can choose the subset of 10 that you will think the audience will most like. But there is the temptation to throw in a couple other juicy bits of red meat that you think will make the crowd happy.

In this case, my guess is that Ferguson thought that a bit of Keynes-bashing would go over well at a conference of financial advisors. But what about the homophobia, the presumably irrelevant bits about ballet and poetry? Here I have no idea. This could be coming from Ferguson’s gut, he may have internalized the fag-bashing attitudes that we were all exposed to in junior high school. Or maybe it was a failed attempt on Ferguson’s part to be a “regular guy.” Maybe it’s a bit of Oxford/Harvard snobbery on Ferguson’s part, that he thinks that a room full of businessmen will respond well to not-so-subtle locker-room-style allusions to sissy stuff? This time, however, rather than establishing Ferguson’s street-cred as a real man, it just embarrassed him. In retrospect, he would’ve been better off with some Henny Youngman-style zingers.

I don’t think Ferguson’s remark was entirely an attempt to please the crowd. As Cowen, Alterman, and others point out, he has a history of personally smearing his political opponents and, in particular, of attributing Keynes’s political and economic attitudes to his sexuality. And, indeed, it’s completely reasonable for a historian to consider such connections. In this case, however, I don’t think Ferguson was making such explorations. The bits about ballet and poetry give it away. He was making an “us vs. them” move. And then, to his dismay, he found out that most people are on the side of “them.”

I completely understand why Ferguson called the move “stupid” and I have every reason to think he was sincere in his regret. I think the commenters quoted above didn’t completely understand this because they treated Ferguson’s original remarks as serious statements by a historian rather than an attempt a crowd-pleasing by someone who was unsuccessfully trying to act like a “regular guy.”

P.S. In answer to the natural question, Why do I care about this?, my response is that I see something of myself in pop-academics such as Ferguson, researchers who also write and speak for popular audiences. Ferguson is of course much more successful at that than I am, but I am aware of the tradeoffs involved in balancing scholarship and communication.

A TEDxSydney talk by Stanford political scientist Simon Jackman.  His post about it is here.

Much of politics is about collective action, whereby groups of people need to cooperate in order to produce an outcome.  One of the biggest challenges is getting people to cooperate in providing a public good, which by its nature can be shared by everyone regardless of whether they’ve cooperated in the first place.

One way to enforce cooperation is via some central authority that’s external to the group (like a government).  Another way, prominent in Elinor Ostrom’s work, is via internal policing by peers within the group.

In this NSF-funded study by Guy Grossman and Delia Baldassarri show that a third way can work as well: developing a leadership or authority structure within the group itself.  More importantly, they show that the success of such an authority depends on politics itself.  Leaders need to be elected to induce cooperation.

The study was conducted among Ugandans who are members of farmer organizations and experience directly the challenges of cooperating to produce public goods.  Grossman and Baldassarri not only examined how these people behaved when asked to play a simple “public goods game” in a quasi-laboratory setting, but how they actually behaved within their farmer organization in real life.  In both contexts, members cooperated significantly more when leaders were democratically elected—as was true in one experimental condition of the public goods game—or when they perceived the leadership of their farmer organization as more legitimate.   Grossman and Baldassarri summarize one implication of this finding:

We began by demonstrating experimentally something quite intuitive—that elections increase the value of a local public good. But as we began ruling out options commonly associated with why elections are deemed beneficial, we were left with an important finding. Elections increased the value of local public goods even after we eliminate incumbents’ reelection considerations, and even when we minimize the information voters have on potential candidates, reducing their ability to select more able and more responsive leaders. We found evidence suggesting that something fundamental causes us to be more prosocial when we participate in key political process such as elections. That elections affect not only the behavior of incumbents but also the behavior of constituents who had participated in the electoral process is among the key findings of our study.

It is easy to see why such a study is valuable even by the criteria proposed by Senator Coburn.  Engendering cooperative and pro-social behavior is intrinsic not only to economic productivity—as was true in these farmer organizations—but also to ensuring security and peace.  Granted, this is but one study in one setting, but this research agenda remains fundamental.  Indeed, this agenda is the reason for Ostrom’s Nobel Prize.

[For more in this week’s presentation of NSF-funded research recently published in the American Journal of Political Science, see here, here, and here.]

Via a Facebook friend, an analysis of the sound and fury surrounding MOOCs by Aaron Bady:

Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education ischanging how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly [sic] omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.

There’s a striking similarity between this kind of rhetoric and early globalization discourse. Indeed, one of the best ways to force change is to argue that the transformation is already happening.

I very much recommend reading the whole piece and not simply the excerpts I’ve culled from it. Bady does a much better — and more systematic — job than I did of linking together what Kohen calls “edutainment,” TED talks, and MOOCs. But among the many gems in the essay is this critical insight about MOOC discourse:

Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.

I’ve often wondered about my own hostility to MOOC-talk. I’ve generally been a fairly early adopter of various technologies in an educational environment. I was one of the first professors to podcast lectures at Georgetown. I put up (mediocre) youtube lectures in 2008. I’ve been an evangelist in my field for public engagement via social media. So why am I not among the enthusiasts?

It might be that, like many academics, I stand to lose a lot from disruptive innovation. My line of work is one of the last to experience the relentless drive of late capitalism at the hands of business-consultant rent-seekers. My employer is prestigious, but not terribly financially secure. So perhaps the anti-professor rants that often show up on these threads have a point: I don’t want my cushy lifestyle to end. I’ll grant that this is some of it.

But the fundamental reason is, I think, that I’ve been there and done that. As Bady notes, there’s absolutely nothing new about MOOCs. Sure, the technology is better. We can record and post high-definition video relatively easily. Developers have created applications that reduce the effort needed to splice together a lecture and that allow for the relatively easy synching of various video and textual online resources. Moreover, decent online conferencing used to require dedicated equipment. Now we can do it — for free or a relatively small fee — through services such as Skype and Google Hangout.*

Still… none of that amounts to a game changer.

What I’ve found is that recorded lectures work best as supplements to ongoing courses. Most of the “thank you” notes I receive for the material I’ve put online bear this out. They tend to involve students who were having trouble understanding a particular topic, and needed to hear (or see) someone explain it in a different way. Now, one can construct a MOOC environment that does this well: combines the sage-on-stage with virtual discussion sections, online resources, and so forth. And there’s value to that. But your mileage will vary; the elements that make a MOOC seem of high quality might even be detrimental to educational outcomes.

By all means, add MOOCs to the arsenal of higher education. But don’t let  technofashionistas and op-ed columnists — let alone those who stand to earn a lot of money from expanded investment in MOOC infrastructure — convince you that a revolution is here. And, whatever else we do, we shouldn’t enable them to assist in dismantling a system that stands amongst the best in the world. Educational consultants, state legislators, and professional administrators are doing just fine with that on their own.

*Although my experience with Google Hangout is that each additional student online significantly increases the chance that connection failures, ambient noise, and other problems will disrupt the experience beyond repair.

Andrew Eggers, Olle Folke, Anthony Fowler, Jens Hainmueller, Andrew Hall, and Jim Snyder write:

Many papers use regression discontinuity (RD) designs that exploit “close” election outcomes in order to identify the effects of election results on various political and economic outcomes of interest. Several recent papers critique the use of RD designs based on close elections because of the potential for imbalance near the threshold that distinguishes winners from losers. In particular, for U.S. House elections during the post-war period, lagged variables such as incumbency status and previous vote share are significantly correlated with victory even in very close elections. This type of sorting naturally raises doubts about the key RD assumption that the assignment of treatment around the threshold is quasi-random. In this paper, we examine whether similar sorting occurs in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S., and national and/or local elections in a variety of other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, India, and Brazil. No other case exhibits sorting. Evidently, the U.S. House during the post-war period is an anomaly.

In case you got lost somewhere during that paragraph, here it is again:

Across more than 40,000 closely contested elections in many different electoral settings, we find no systematic evidence of sorting around the electoral threshold. Conditional on being in a very close election, incumbents are no better at winning than challengers. . . . the sorting and imbalance that has been discovered in the U.S. House is most likely a statistical fluke . . . Recent concerns about the validity of electoral RD designs appear overblown, as we find no evidence that the underlying assumptions are categorically unsound.

Got it? It makes sense to me.

In between making organic cupcakes for my daughters’ school, completing a grant application, tending my organic vegetables, and finishing an R&R for a journal, I came across this little gem of a working paper (thanks to Freakonomics Blog).[1] This new research shows the following:

“Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband” (abstract).

So, in a nutshell, women who earn more than their husbands get a whole bunch of bad stuff as a result: divorce and unhappiness, plus more time spent cleaning the toilet.  As a female academic who makes X times more than my public-school teacher spouse, I’m not sure what to make of this.[2]  The social science methods are commendable.  The conclusions seem to follow existing literature. It’s also consistent with advice great female scholars in the discipline have given me at various Women in Methodology and Women in Conflict Studies events. [3] Thankfully, I can’t really reconcile this with my own experiences either in my marriage or in the division of labor in my household.[4] I hope to remain an outlier.

I’ve mulled this over for a day or so and have come to the only conclusion that someone (a) with two little girls and (b) who studies advocacy and human rights can: I’m going to be a norm entrepreneur on this one. The new[5] norm I’m going to be promoting: real men can handle their spouse making more than them.  And, they can help clean the toilet.

Who’s with me?

Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student couter-point to TRIP. Eventually the goal is an article on our students’ attitudes toward the discipline; here is the full write-up of  the project at e-IR. So far as I know, nothing like this has been done before (please comment if that is incorrect), so this strikes me as the interesting sort of student work we should support. Daryl’s made an interesting effort to use Twitter as a simulation tool in IR, so I am happy to pitch this survey for him. Please take a look; Daryl may be contacted here.

With the semester coming to an end, time to hit the Internets and start blogging more regularly. I’ve been meaning to write one for months about the poaching crisis. It’s coming. In the meantime, here is yet another story on the corrosive effects on governance by Sudanese elephant poachers in the Central African Republic.

Elsewhere, it’s not been a good week for the Obama Administration but good news for team O, the media agree that the Benghazi mess has been overblown:

• David Brooks on the scapegoating of State Department hand Victoria Neuland
• Jeffrey Goldberg concurs that Susan Rice was not to blame
• Read the emails for your self

In other news, personal health confessionals become something more:

• Actress Angelina Jolie on her double mastectomy after becoming aware of the BRCA gene and her high likelihood of developing the same cancer that killed her mother.
• Times contributor Andrew Revkin on how he has progressed since having a stroke 22 months ago

The father of modern IR theory Ken Waltz died this week if you were living in a cave without internet access

• Steve Walt’s remembrance
• Our own Duck liege Dan offered his own as well

Lots of bad news in Asia right now:

• China’s water crisis affecting its growth
• Cambodia shoe firm roof collapse
• Bangladesh, on top of the garment factory tragedy, is facing an imminent cyclone risk, a million evacuated

… because someday someone might write this about you:

But as we all eventually learn the hard way, Nyhan ALWAYS COLLECTS HIS MONEY, HONEY.

That’s Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post writing about Dartmouth University political scientist and blogger Brendan Nyhan. The topic in question? Nyhan’s research about scandals and US presidents—he blogged about it here— which, if I’m not mistaken, was a somewhat big topic yesterday in the US media.

And yes, for those keeping track, Nyhan did have a scandal probability forecasting figure:

During the April 2004 oral arguments in the Hamdi v Rumsfeld case about whether an American citizen could be detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant, Supreme Court Justice David Souter sought to probe the breadth of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which the Court ultimately held did support Hamdi’s detention, albeit with some procedural rights attached.

Souter asked:

“Is it reasonable to think that the authorization was sufficient at the time that it was passed, but that at some point, it is a Congressional responsibility, and ultimately a constitutional right on this person’s part, for Congress to assess the situation and either pass more specific continuing authorization or at least to come up with the conclusion that its prior authorization was good enough. Doesn’t Congress at some point have a responsibility to do more than pass that resolution? …. You come with an authorization that the President relied on and which I will assume he quite rightly relied on at the time it was passed. But my question is a timing question. Is it not reasonable to at least consider whether that resolution needs, at this point, to be supplemented and made more specific to authorize what you are doing?”

Congress has ignored this broad hint from the bench for nine years. During that time, the Bush and especially the Obama administrations have stressed that a wide range of executive actions are justified by the continuing statutory language of the AUMF. (Obama’s team has done this more explicitly, and sought to distinguish their rationale from the Bush administration, which sometimes relied instead on inherent executive authority grounded in Article II. Whether it is better to do the wrong things for the right reasons, or vice versa, I will leave to T.S. Eliot. )

The AUMF’s text is very broad, resolving “that the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” That last clause is particularly sweeping. Still, given the link in the resolution between the President’s authority and the 2001 attacks, is it broad enough to cover ongoing drone strikes (against American citizens, and not) in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan? Intervention in Syria?  How closely connected to the 9/11 attackers, or to Al Qaeda, or to its affiliates, does someone (who could have been of grade-school age at the time) have to be, to count as someone who “aided” those attacks? Could the AUMF apply to the Boston marathon bombers?

These are the kinds of questions Souter presciently raised, and the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing today at 9:30 am to start a potentially important conversation about their resolution. The list of those testifying is here. Today’s Washington Post editorializes in favor of a new AUMF; Lawfare has a useful summary of some of the arguments here.

UPDATE - 2:36 pm, 16 May – a webcast of the hearing (3 hours plus) can be found here.

Oh Noes!!!

Image credit: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

• Tracking vaccine scares in Africa.
• Edward Hugh on Abenomics.
• Paul Krugman’s New York Review of Books essay on austerity features Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (via).
• Some additional reflections on Kenneth Waltz and his ideas from Rajesh Rajagopalan, Robert Farley, and Michael Desch.
• Mark Kersten slams the ICC’s website.
• Kelly Strøm: “How Syria Ruined Marc Lynch’s Spring.”
• Tom Pepinsky considers the possibility of an “authoritarian data advantage.”
• Jay Ulfelder does TEDx.
• Footnoting Florida Polytechnic University’s explanation of why it won’t have tenure.
• Tom Nichols thinks that the Benghazi controversy is worth getting to the bottom of. I agree, but I’d be a lot more enthused about the effort if congress showed any indication of being an honest investigator.

One of the traditional responsibilities of sane conservative parties is to write-out of respectability and legitimacy the scary, nut-job right-wing fringe. There can’t be a ‘no-enemies-on-the-right’ strategy, or you wind up with anti-Semites, racists, and black-helicopter guys grabbing all the media attention and delegitimizing wider conservative goals. In the US, Bill Buckley explicitly intended the National Review to screen out the John Birch Society and the American Mercury. In Germany, the CDU/CSU keeps the nationalist/neo-Nazi fringe at bay. (I worked for both GOP and CSU legislators in the past, so I’ve actually seen this in action. The late-night/AM newsradio listeners come out of the woodwork to tell you all about Jewish banker conspiracies and stuff like that.) In Japan, that means the LDP has to tamp down the endless Pacific War revisionism that keeps popping up. And for as much as I think Abenomics is an important Keynesian antidote to the right-wing monetarist-austerity hysteria of the last five years, it’s also increasingly clear that Abe’s victory allowed the Japanese version of the Birchers to get all sorts of air time they shouldn’t.

 

Here is what I wrote on my own blog, which has a substantial Japanese and Korean readership (it’s blocked by the great firewall in China unfortunately):

“If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know I try to avoid the details of the Korea-Japan tussle. It gets so emotional so fast. Like most Americans, I want Japan and Korea to reconcile so they can work together on the larger, more important issues of North Korea and China. I don’t take a position on the Dokdo/Takeshima flap. I refuse to call the Sea of Japan the ‘East Sea’ (do you want to re-name the Korea Strait too?). When Koreans push me about the war, I try to deflect the issue. It is really not appropriate for outsiders, especially Americans, to weigh in on the details of Asian disputes. We can’t be an umpire to local fights, and our intervention would be seen as illegitimate by the losing party anyway. This is also the USG’s position: we have no position other than that we want all the parties to work out the disagreements with coercion or force. That’s the right attitude IMO.

Since Abe came into office, I have been defending him in Korea, which is fairly thankless and annoying to lots of people here. He’s made regrettable and obnoxious noises about revising the Kono Declaration. His cabinet is filled with righties, some of them genuinely unnerving. Catering to domestic right-wing attitudes on the war isn’t really what his PM-ship should be about anyway, but my Japanese colleagues say it’s all just cosmetic or needed baggage to push through necessary economic changes. And then there’s always the Global Times – the Fox News of China – to reliably exaggerate any Japanese swing to the right as a return to fascism. It’s easy for China and Korea to get carried away.

Hence, I defended the Abe government early on in Korean media. That didn’t win me any friends here, but I thought it necessary to give him a chance. And I figured Abe was smart enough, even if he is a nationalist, to avoid provoking all Asia over Yasukuni yet again. I got that one pretty wrong *sigh*. I have chastised Koreans for fetishizing Dokdo to point of war preparations against Japan. When Newsweek Korea asked me this week for an article on the ‘rise of right-wing Japan,’ I sent in an article instead saying that Koreans and Japanese need to work out their differences and that the US should not play a ‘moral hazard’ role empowering maximalists on both sides to say outrageous stuff. In that same piece, I criticized President Lee Myung-Bak’s trip to Dokdo last year as an embarrassing, flag-waving nationalist gimmick (which it was).

I also thought Abenomics was a great idea. Austerity has pretty clearly failed in Europe, and if a nationalist Abe was what was needed to shake Japan out of its decline, then so be it. Japan is the main bulwark against Chinese primacy in Asia, even if Japan’s erstwhile colonies don’t want to admit that. In the last few days, I made all these remarks, defending both Abenomics in the JoongAng Daily and a stand-offish US attitude toward the details of the Japan-Korea flap in Newsweek Korea. I am about as ‘pro-Japanese’ – in the sense of encouraging a Korean-Japanese reconciliation – as you get in Korea without getting in trouble.

But the comfort women denialism of the last few days is just too much. Jesus Christ. Do we really have to go through why sexual slavery is god-awful and should be apologized for? And don’t tell me it was ‘prostitution;’ almost all these women were coerced and not ‘paid’ – except that they were given a place to sleep and something to eat. This is a real WTF moment after months of creepy talk from the corners of the Abe coalition. This endless re-writing of the Pacific War in Japan really needs to stop. Abe needs to say something. The respectable right in Japan needs to contain the revanchists, as it does in Germany.

My friend Dan Pinkston of the International Crisis Group here in Korea is a much tougher critic of the Japanese right than I am, but he’s absolutely correct here. If Dan is right that the US could get Japan to lay off the Yasukuni stuff, we should do it. Abenomics is not a blank check for shameless revisionism.”

Cross-posted at Asian Security Blog,

Political scientists are about to test some of their research in the field. The American Political Science Association has hired Barbara Kennelly Associates and Maria Freese. The association will lobby on “appropriations for State, Justice, Commerce — to eliminate restrictions on political science funding through the National Science Foundation.”

From Politico, with my link added.  Via Matt Corley.

A perennial and crucial question—one intimately tied to the national security interests of the United States—is how to design political institutions that can mitigate ethnic conflict.  This issue was front-and-center when the United States worked to establish new Iraqi political institutions after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (see, for example, here).  The conundrum is this: can you design political institutions that enable ethnic groups to be or at least feel represented in government, while not simultaneously exacerbating ethnic divisions?

In this article, political scientist John Huber investigates one important institution: proportional representation.  Here is his summary of what he found:

What is the best electoral law for stable democratic government in ethnically divided societies?  Constitutional engineers have long debated this question, typically focusing on the relative merits of proportional electoral laws (“PR”), which provide representation to parties in proportion to the number of votes that parties receive.  It has been widely believed that PR politicizes ethnicity, with some arguing that this is a good thing (because each ethnic group will have its own party, encouraging them to participate non-violently in the democratic process) and some arguing it is bad (because the goal should be to depoliticize ethnicity, encouraging voters to focus on other factors, such as economic class).  This debate, however, has been plagued by the absence of facts:  we have not had the technology to test the effect of electoral laws on the politicization of ethnicity.

This research develops measures that can be used to assess the degree to which ethnicity is politicized in the electoral politics of a country.   The measures focus on the connection between ethnic identity and voting behavior.  The tighter this connection, the greater the degree of ethnic politicization.  Applying the measure to a wide range of countries, the study demonstrates that in fact PR is associated with lower levels of politicization.   This finding has important implications for constitutional design in divided societies and provides fact-based evidence supporting advocates for PR.

It also helps us to understand racial politics in the US.  If Hispanic Americans want to be influential as a group within the plurality system of the US, they must vote cohesively. If the US operated under proportional representation, then different parties would compete for the Hispanic vote thereby diminishing the salience of race in elections.

[For more in this week’s presentation of NSF-funded research recently published in the American Journal of Political Science, see here and here.]

A letter by political scientist Rick Wilson, published in Science (gated):

The “Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013” (1) guaranteeing funding for the federal government has, buried in the legislation, a direct attack on science. Senator Tom Coburn (R–OK) introduced an amendment that eliminates all political science research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), except where it promotes the “national security or the economic interests of the United States” (2). The amendment passed under a voice vote in the Senate, the full bill passed both the Senate and the House, and the President signed it into law on 26 March.

While a seemingly innocuous bit of legislating, this amendment constitutes a serious threat to the conduct of science in the United States. The NSF has long been a preeminent institution for funding basic research and relies on an independent peer-reviewed system. Now political judgment is supplanting scientific judgment. The congressional mandate is clear: No funding will be available for basic research in political science. Legislation now dictates which topics can be studied and eliminates entire fields of study.

Some scientists may view this as a minor matter. After all, some believe that the study of politics cannot be scientific or that this is simply one small program among hundreds at NSF. However, political science is a defined discipline. It studies the exercise of power, it tests hypotheses, and it draws inferences from well-measured empirical phenomena. Worse, the larger science community should not ignore the shackling of one program at NSF. If politics dictates what is worth studying, all disciplines are at risk. Why stop at political science? Why not neuter any grants that touch on evolutionary theories? After all, many in Congress deny the value of Darwin. The challenge to science is clear. If politics determines what is palatable, we could be picked off one at a time. The science community needs to clearly voice its opposition to this political intrusion in defining what is acceptable science.

Ari Kohen on the value of “edutainment“:

Finally, and most importantly, is the central claim that the test of education is whether or not it’s entertaining. Wales asks, “why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?” Is there evidence that the most entertaining lecture is the one that gets “knowledge into people’s heads”? Again, I’m not suggesting that a boring lecture is going to do the trick, but I’m arguing that entertaining students doesn’t necessarily equate with teaching them something. When I lecture on Kant, I don’t think I’m really entertaining my students. In my opinion, Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals doesn’t lend itself to entertainment; it’s a dense text that needs some serious explication. Now, I don’t speak in a monotone and I try to find relevant examples to help them make sense of the material, but I’m not standing in front of the class hoping that they’ll all have a great time; I’m standing there with the express purpose of teaching them about Kant.

As far as I am aware, we lack strong evidence to suggest a positive relationship between how much students enjoy a class and how much they actually learn. Yet the rise of the “corporate model” in higher education creates strong pressures toward the “edutainment” model.

It isn’t inevitable that the students-as-consumer model should translate into an understanding of “customer satisfaction” as “having a good time,” but it’s pretty hard to avoid that trap, especially when dealing with (1) outcomes that can’t easily be assessed at the end of a semester; (2) evaluations that focus on the personal characteristics of an instructor; (3) cultural ideals of educators as sources of personal inspiration, and (4) the blending of entertainment and educational media.

Throw in techno-evangelism surrounding MOOCS and recorded lectures? The ultimate model for classroom education becomes TED. Now that’s a frightening thought.

 

Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone. Lehman Brothers seemed a good option for top graduates in 2007. Just a year later, it too was gone.

Right now, nothing looks more solid, more like that snow-covered mountainside, than the traditional university. … [I]t would be easy to conclude that right now we have seen the realisation, the full flowering, of the 20th century concept of the university. Indeed, the rise of universities in the developing world, often based on this western paradigm, is the ultimate endorsement – imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery. The mountainside looks solid indeed, but there are changes ‘under the surface’. They are ‘rather invisible’, but they are unmistakable. An avalanche is coming. It’s hard, of course, to say exactly when. It may be sooner than we think. Certainly there is no better time than now to seek to understand what lies ahead for higher education – and to prepare.

From the recently released Institute for Public Policy Research publication An Avalanche is Coming. See as well the recent New Yorker article “Is College Moving Online?“.

[h/t to @kinggary.]

The Theory Section seeks nominations for its new conference paper awards. All papers with a strong theoretical focus which were presented at the 2013 ISA conference in San Francisco are eligible. The Theory Section seeks to honor excellent work in theorizing international politics across the plurality of theoretical approaches. Two awards will be granted: one for a paper presented by a graduate student or other non-PhD holder, and another for a paper by a post-PhD scholar.

The award committee is composed of Daniel J. Levine (University of Alabama), Jennifer Mitzen (Ohio State University), and Annette Freyberg-Inan (University of Amsterdam).

Paper nominations, with papers attached in pdf, word, or rtf format, should be sent to Annette Freyberg-Inan at a.freyberginan@uva.nl before August 1^st 2013.

Pew has a very interesting new survey out on attitudes towards the European Union among citizens of eight EU countries. Here are a just a few of the more interesting results.

First, attitudes towards the EU are getting worse. While there is always going to be some noise in these kind of data, the consistency of the negative changes is noticeable. What I think is potentially most important are the two countries (France and Spain) where we’ve gone from significant majorities with a favorable view of the EU to majorities without a favorable view. The stunningly low numbers of Czechs who now see EU membership as having harmed economic development is also worth noting.

Second, contrary to popular wisdom, large numbers of people still seem to prefer cutting spending in order to reduce the debt as opposed to stimulus spending as a way out of the crisis, the Reinhart-Rogoff brouhaha not witstanding. The headline number here in France is really quite stunning, but given the recent tone of the political discussion in Italy I would not have predicted twice as many people supporting cuts to reduce the debt to stimulus there either. (Greece as the outlier here though makes sense.)

Third, Pew probably even undersold this point – Germans appear to be living on a different planet, let along a different continent. (Although I wonder about the decision to compare Germany to the median, as opposed to mean, level of support on each of these different questions. Would make it irrelevant whether other countries above the median are closer to median or closer to German levels):

Finally, some slightly more lighthearted data (although note the correlation between being trustworthy and arrogant!). Found it interesting that people apparently value seeing themselves as compassionate more than trustworthy or not arrogant. Also not sure what to make of the fact that French see themselves as most arrogant in Europe!

Finally, as someone who studies post-communist countries, it was interesting for me to see that when Pew picked eight countries for the study, two of them were post-communist EU members (Poland and the Czech Republic). Not sure why they left out all of the post-communist Euro adaptors (Slovenia, Slovakia, and Estonia), but hey, it’s a start.

Full report is available here.

Pike's dissertation will be available at your campus library in 2234.

I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them.

The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS Kelvin, of course, and one of its victims was First Officer George Kirk, who was about to become James Kirk's father. So we see the effects that the timeline shift had on young Jim, who is now growing up fatherless. This may make him angrier, a bit less disciplined, maybe even more of a womanizer (if that's possible), but he still has his aptitude for command, and he still becomes the Enterprise's captain -- earlier than he would have in the original timeline.

Here's another interesting twist: We learn that Christopher Pike, the Enterprise's captain prior to Kirk, wrote his dissertation at Starfleet Academy on the destruction of the Kelvin. I have no idea what his dissertation was about in the old timeline, but it was most assuredly on a different topic. And yet we still see him growing up to command Starfleet's flagship. All of which means that your dissertation topic doesn't matter. So don't worry about it.

Poli-Sci Perspective is a weekly Wonkblog feature in which Georgetown University’s Dan Hopkins and George Washington University’s Danny Hayes and John Sides offer an empirical perspective on the issues dominating Washington. In this edition, Sides looks at why campaign tactics don’t always work as well as we’d think. For past posts in the series, head here.

The narrative after the 2012 campaign was that President Obama’s victory was due to his superior campaign — better messaging, better technology, better organizing, better everything.  But this narrative had a circular logic to it: Obama won because of his superior campaign, and we know that his campaign was superior because he won.

Several initial forays into the data on advertising and field offices suggest a much more qualified conclusion: yes, campaigning did matter, but it was not decisive in 2012.  This parallels what Ezra wrote earlier last week: we got too excited over money in this election — and by extension the electioneering it could buy. In this post, I build on some previous work for Wonkblog and work with Lynn Vavreck for our book on the 2012 campaign, The Gamble. I’ll briefly explore 4 reasons why it is hard for all that money — in particular the ads and field organization, or what I’ll call “campaign activity” — to be the “game-changer” it is so often made out to be.

Reason #1: Campaign activity can be overwhelmed by other events in the campaign.

Throughout the 2012 campaign, candidates were spending millions every week — blanketing key states with advertisements — only to find that other events swamped any advantage they might have had on the airwaves. Consider what happened to Mitt Romney before his loss to Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina primary. Below are South Carolina polling and advertising data that was gathered by Kantar Media|CMAG and obtained by the Washington Post.  (I analyzed these data throughout the fall of 2012 for Wonkblog.)

In the weeks leading up to the South Carolina primary, Romney was coming off a solid showing in Iowa and a victory in New Hampshire. He also aired much more advertising than Gingrich in South Carolina. But it didn’t matter. As Vavreck and I discuss in our book, Gingrich’s performance in the two South Carolina debates earned him favorable news coverage, and this was enough to push up his poll numbers.

The same thing happened in the general election. Obama had an overall advertising advantage in early October. But that didn’t keep the first debate, plus the favorable news coverage it generated for Romney and unfavorable coverage it generated for Obama, from shifting the poll numbers in Romney’s favor, even in battleground states.

In other words, advantages in campaign activity can be neutralized by other campaign events that sometimes affect the polls (if not the election outcome), like debates.

Reason #2: It can be hard to win the messaging war.

CMAG provided the Post a sense of the major issues discussed in each of the ads. I looked at those issues in the summer of 2012 — a period when the Obama campaign’s ads were thought by many to be particular potent because of his attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. But what emerged from the summer data on advertising content was mainly two lines of argument about the economy — with each side struggling to win the larger debate.

Below is the percentage of each candidate’s ads mentioning various issues in May, June and July.  Because ads could mention more than one issue, the percentages do not add up to 100.

The economy’s preeminence as a campaign issue is plain to see. Obama argued that the economy was improving and that he deserved reelection. Romney argued that the economy was not good enough and Obama should be thrown out. Each could find reasons for both solace and concern in public opinion.

The public was pessimistic about the economy and only a minority approved of Obama’s handling of the economy. That was good news for Romney. But the public also tended to blame George W. Bush a bit more than Obama and tended to believe that Obama was more in touch with the problems facing the middle class. That was bad news for Romney.

In other words, while it is tempting to think that candidates can discover some secret sauce that makes their message irresistible, they often confront a public beset by ambivalence and conflicting opinions. Crafting a message that leverages the nuances of public opinion is tricky. It’s not surprising, then, that the polls during these summer months didn’t move that much.

Reason #3: The effects of campaign activity are short-lived.

A few weeks before the campaign, the National Journal’s Charlie Cook wrote:

If Obama ekes out an electoral-vote win, look back to last spring and summer, to the Romney campaign’s decision not to define him in a personal and positive way and the Obama campaign’s decision to roll the dice by spending an enormous amount of money to discredit Romney in the swing states, as the factors that led to the outcome.

There are two reasons why this is probably not true. First, the ads Cook refers too — attacking Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital — did not air for all that long. They were prominent battleground state campaign activity and in news coverage for only a brief time.

Here is the percent of all Obama ads mentioning Bain and the percent of all news media mentions of Romney that included mentions of Bain, drawing on the media coverage data gathered by General Sentiment.

This graph shows that Romney’s time at Bain Capital was a major part of advertising and news coverage only in July  In part, this was because the Obama campaign emphasized Bain less as the general election campaign heated up. In part, this was because the news coverage of Bain Capital — stimulated in July largely by a Boston Globe story – waned as the media moved on to other topics.

Moreover, as ours and others’ analyses of 2012 advertising effects as well as previous research demonstrate, the effect of ads dissipates quickly — within a few days or even a day. Cook’s characterization suggests that your television is like a nuclear reactor and the summer Obama ads were essentially irradiating you and permanently altering your (political) body chemistry. In reality, ads are more like Tylenol: they work for a short time and then they wear off and you need to see more.

The same thing holds for other kinds of campaign activity as well. In Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, one member of Obama’s 2008 campaign team, Aaron Strauss, put it this way:

The effects of any campaign activity are ephemeral.  Just because you touched someone in, let’s say, the beginning of October doesn’t mean they’ll be with you two weeks or even one week later.

Which leads to the final point…

Reason #4: In most presidential elections it is hard to get a big advantage in campaign activity.

Even if ads are like Tylenol or campaign activity has an ephemeral impact, a candidate could still benefit if he had a sizable advantage in campaign activity day after day. But that was hard to come by in 2012, particularly with regard to advertising.

Even though Obama had an overall advantage for a sizable part of the campaign, and Romney had the advantage at the very end of the campaign, it was relatively rare for either of them to have a large advantage in very many places. For example, Lynn Vavreck and I found that if on the day before Election Day, Romney had an advertising lead in a media market that amounted to an additional three ad viewings per capita, he would have received an additional three-tenths of a point of vote share. That was not enough to make up his deficit in key battleground states, but neither was it nothing. The bigger problem was just that he had an advantage that size or greater in only 15 percent of battleground state counties.

When both candidates and their allies have a billion-plus dollars to spend, each side’s efforts mostly neutralize the other’s. That is what seemed to happen in 2012. Both campaigns were sufficiently effective that any effects of campaign activity were not large enough to be decisive. The growing economy set the stage for an incumbent party win, and the two campaigns ultimately reinforced that fact.

So why bother to raise and spend all this money? The problem is that letting your opponent get a larger advantage is exactly what might hurt you on Election Day. No one wants to be Al Gore and lose the Electoral College by 537 votes. In essence, presidential candidates raise money to ensure a tie — or at best gain the sort of small edge that wasn’t decisive in a race like 2012, where the final margin simply wasn’t that close. But a small edge could be decisive in elections like 1960, 1968, or 2000. In fact, not all of those three elections were initially predicted to be that close. It was the candidates who helped make them close.

So, where’s the smart money on campaigns making a difference? Campaign activity can decide an election’s outcome. But it likely didn’t in 2012.

Kenneth Waltz died last night. From an email sent by Robert Jervis:

It is with great sadness that I have to report that Ken Waltz died last night.  As many of you know, his health had been uncertain ever since he lost much of his sight a year ago, and about a month ago he was hospitalized with pneumonia.  While he recovered enough to be discharged to rehab, a combination of a return of pneumonia and congestive heart failure sent him back to the hospital a few days ago.

He was a few weeks short of 89 but until the very end remained fully lucid and engaged. Indeed he was looking forward to a trip to the UK with his daughter-in-law in the fall, and the day before he went into the hospital had lunch with Les Gelb & Henry Kissinger (& remarked that the latter’s age was showing).  Despite being unable to see well enough to read, his spirits remained high until the end, which came quickly.

We will all miss him greatly both for his scholarship & his personality.

Waltz was a giant in the field. His two most important works – Man, The State, and War and Theory of International Politics – provided the framework within, and against, international-relations scholars have argued for much of the post-WWII period.

Whatever one thinks of structural realism and its progeny, Waltz got some big things right, including the dangers of military intervention on behalf of ideological crusades. He also wrote the pithiest “correspondence” piece ever likely to appear in International Security.

 

I didn’t know Waltz well. I took his seminar when he taught at Columbia. I found him engaging, supportive, thoughtful, and open to a wide variety of perspectives and ideas. He was kind enough to write one of my job-market letters of recommendations, for which I will always be grateful.

He spent some of his last months in an assisted-living facility in the DC area. His eyesight was failing. He apparently found it quite boring; so graduate students, including one from Georgetown, read articles to him.

A final  possibly apocryphal anecdote. one that I hope readers will correct as necessary. Waltz began his doctoral studies (at Columbia) as a political theorist, but switched to International Relations. In those days, students didn’t present their dissertation proposals. Instead, their advisors did.

Waltz’s advisor, William T.R. Fox, therefore brought the thesis proposal that would become Man, the State, and War before a committee of professors. The general response? No one really understood what Waltz was doing, but, they agreed, he was a smart guy; they should just let him pursue it.

Thanks to Stacie Goddard for providing the following confirmation  from Ken’s obituary for Bill Fox in PS. As she notes, the story is even better than she and I remembered it. For a remembrance from one of his actual advisees, see Steve Walt’s heartfelt post.

Kenneth Waltz passed away last night. Waltz was one of the most influential international relations scholars of his generation. I did not know him well, although I saw him not too long ago at a Georgetown event (he moved to the area recently). His influence was such that it is impossible not to know or teach his work if you are in international relations. My favorite book is Man, the State and War, which has withstood the test of time very well. I will post some more obituaries when they come in. Here are some thoughts by Dan Nexon at the Duck of Minerva.

Stephen Walt shares his memories here.

Updates:

• Foreign Affairs has made available some of Waltz’s writings. If you don’t know it already, read his work on nuclear proliferation and you get a sense of his original, rigorous, and controversial thinking.


• Waltz expresses his perspective on a broad range of issues in his usual concise and clear manner in this recent interview.


• Steve Saideman offers thoughts here.

The fifth largest city in Jordan is the Zaatari refugee camp, where approximately 175,000 Syrians fleeing their country’s war now live.  This is but a fraction of the 500,000 Syrians who have fled to Jordan, and an even smaller fraction of Syrians who have fled their own homes and now live in other countries or elsewhere within Syria.  Obviously, the displacement of civilians depends in part on presence or threat of violence.  But what else may explain whether citizens flee conflict?

In his doctoral research—supported in part by the National Science Foundation—Prakash Adhikari studied the factors that led civilians to flee in a different conflict, the Nepalese Civil War, that displaced approximately 50,000 people from their homes.  A survey of both displaced and non-displaced Nepalese revealed not only the role of violence, but the importance of economic infrastructure (and its destruction).  People who lived in villages with an industry present—in this case, one that employed 10 or more people—were less likely to flee.  People who lost crops, animals, or land were more likely to flee.

None of these findings is surprising on its face.  But Adhikari’s work suggests that the logic of displacement is more than just about violence or physical threat.  And—though Nepal and Syria are in no way strictly analogous (the juxtaposition here is mine, not his)—Adhikari’s work suggests how the United States and the rest of the international community might be able to prevent large-scale forced migration: not only by working to reduce the threat of violence, but by supporting the economic and social infrastructure of affected communities.  Foreign governments and NGOs already do this, of course, but Adhikari’s work shows that such efforts can be consequential.

Moreover, given how displacement only adds to the human toll and political destabilization caused by civil war, and given that the United States frequently assists in ending civil wars or at least mitigating their effects, I think this research also happens to meet Senator Coburn’s stated criterion that federally funded research serve the national security of the United States.

The article is here.

[This post is part of this week’s presentation of NSF-funded political science research.]

The collapse of the Rana Plaza complex, which included several garment manufacturers, is yet another reminder of the working conditions that too often prevail in the apparel sector. The collapse resulted in over 1,100 deaths, and the toll continues to rise.

The global apparel industry is characterized by a vast network of subcontracting relationships. Major brands rarely own the factories in which their products are made; most factories process orders for a variety of firms, and most brands rely on an array of subcontractors. These arm’s length relationships make it difficult for even well-intentioned global brands to monitor conditions in their supply chains (see here for my argument the effects of subcontracting versus directly owned production on workers’ rights). Additionally, with competition in the industry based on speed and price – the subcontractor who can deliver cheaply and quickly enough to satisfy fickle Western consumer markets tends to win business – local factories have incentives to ignore domestic laws and corporate codes of conduct related to working hours and health and safety.

These dynamics have rendered violations of labor standards a commonplace occurrence in the apparel sector. This is not to say, of course, that such violations do not occur elsewhere in developing world economies. Indeed, some would argue that citizens of Bangladesh might prefer conditions in garment factories to those in the agriculture sector, or to unemployment. But when workers in these factories routinely risk their lives to produce low-cost fashions for consumers in wealthy nations, there is a sense that we can, and should, do better.

Indeed, it is that sense that motivated the now decades-old movement toward corporate social responsibility. The CSR ideal suggested that US- and European-based firms would use their market power to compel first their subsidiaries, and then their suppliers, to comply with basic standards in the treatment of their workers as well as their local environment. Consumers and shareholders would attend to and reward such behavior, further building a virtuous circle of improved conditions in low and middle income countries.

But this ideal often has not been achieved:  problems of monitoring and compliance have been rife, and many consumers are unwilling to pay more for “ethical consumption.” Where consumers are interested in “fair trade” product (see Hainmueller and Hiscox’s field experiments on this), they often have great difficulty accessing information about the conditions under which goods are produced  (here’s one attempt to help them). Even well-intentioned multinationals, seeking to help their suppliers and subsidiaries build the capacity to improve working conditions, often fell short. Thus, private governance increasingly has seemed a poor substitute for public sector regulation. (See Rick Locke’s recently-published book on this subject, as well as this Boston Review symposium, for a discussion of the private governance model).

What, then, should we make of today’s announcement by four large Western apparel retailers that they will help fund safety upgrades at factories in Bangladesh? Does this offer any hope for preventing incidents like the Rana Plaza collapse or the Tarzeen factory fires? The agreement mandates third-party safety inspections, as well as mandatory repairs (paid for by Western firms) when problems are identified. The agreement obligates retailers to cease doing business with facilities that do not make safety improvements’, and it calls for a greater voice for organized labor.

The good news is that the number of global firms involved has now expanded to include key players in the global market.  US-based PVH and German firm Tchibo signed this agreement late last year, but other firms had been slow to take part. The spotlight of Rana Plaza has mobilized some consumers, and it has compelled firms such as Swedish-based H&M (the largest purchaser of garments made in Bangladesh) and Spanish-based Inditex (owner of fast-fashion chain Zara) to commit to the accord. British-based Primark and Tesco also signed on today, as did Dutch firm C&A. With more global brands involved, it will be more difficult for Bangladesh-based factories to ignore domestic laws or corporate codes of conduct.

At the same time, however, the problem of enforcement remains: will the independent inspectors offer thorough reports; will global firms follow through on their commitments to fund improvements or to transfer their order; and will local labor groups be more empowered? On the latter, the government of Bangladesh has proposed labor law reforms which would make it easier for workers to form and join unions. Whether this succeeds in Parliament, and whether it comes into practice, remains to be seen.

Finally, other global brands – including US-based Gap and Walmart – have thus far resisted signing the “PVH-Tchibo” agreement. They argue that their own efforts will sufficiently address safety problems, and they bristle at the legally-binding nature of the accord. Activists worry that non-participation by some large firms will imperil the accord’s suggest.  It also is interesting to note the cross-national – dare one say “varieties of capitalism” differences in retailers’ willingness to join the agreement.  European firms have so far been more willing to participate, a pattern that may reflect stronger traditions of predicting labor rights at home (the participation of British firms notwithstanding), as well as greater consumer and shareholder attention to how firms behave abroad. This seems consistent with the finding that the labor standards that prevail in importing nations can have a significant effect on labor standards in producing countries. Time will tell whether, in this case, trade-based upgrading of standards occurs.