Politics and Physics

More on the same. As the readers of this Blog know, Rein Taagepera has made a sustained effort to present physics as a reference for political science. The two comments below can strongly resonate on that point, especially regarding the role of imagination and that of 'collecting stamps'.

From Financial Times, May 16 2009

Sir, CP Snow’s warning on the dangerous split between scientists and literary intellectuals may be deceptive indeed ('The split between scientists and writers', FT, May 9).

Peter Gay recounted the anecdote that the historian (of intellectual ideas) Cassiser liked to tell. He was once was talking to David Hilbert, the great mathematician, and during the conversation Cassirer inquired after one of Hilbert’s bright and promising students. Hilbert was said to have replied: “He is all right. You know, for a mathematician he did not have enough imagination. But he has become a poet and now he is doing fine.”

This was long before science met banking, though. And we know by now what it brings when too few scientists turn to poetry.

Kees van Ravenhorst,
Heemstede, Netherlands

..............

Sir, Sam Leith commemorated CP Snow’s Rede Lecture of 50 years ago and quoted Marcus du Sautoy, “that science is not one culture but many cultures” (“The split between scientists and writers”, May 9).

As a Cambridge scientist, Snow was at the centre of a serious cultural division within science itself. The Cambridge physicist, Ernest Rutherford, had said that “science is either physics or stamp collecting”, which reflected the belief that the descriptive sciences of biology and geology were avocations or hobbies as compared with the “exact sciences”. Butterfly nets and rock hammers were for holidays. The circumstantial evidence gathered by evolutionary biologists to support their theory was seen as “stamp collecting”.

In 1953, inspired by Schrodinger’s essay “What is Life?” three physicists and a geneticist discovered the structure and function of DNA, which has made evolutionary biology a more “exact science”. In 2003 the first phase of the Human Genome Project was completed. In the 21st century, physics and biology are no longer separate scientific cultures.

Hiram Baddeley,
Frome, Somerset, UK

More on Scientific Politics

Rein Taagepera, who was awarded the 2008 Skytte Prize in Political Science, as was celebrated in this Blog, has now his Prize Lecture available, where he talks about "laws of social nature".
You can read it here: CLICK

Europe, like America

I have participated, for the first time, in the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), in New York city. I presented in a set of panels on ‘Empires: European and American Reflections’, effectively organized by Noel Parker (U. of Copenhagen). After spending several hours with about the same people in the same room, two different subjects had clearly appeared:

* ‘empire’ as a polity,

* and ‘imperialism’ as a policy.

‘Empire’ is indeed a form of political community, which can be characterized by encompassing a vast territory, having mobile frontiers, a variety of local formulas and a diversity of links with the center, which has existed for most of human history. In contrast to empire, ‘state’ is another form of polity implying fixed borders, homogeneity and a unique center of ‘sovereignty’, which has successfully existed only on a minority of the world territory for only about three hundred years.

‘Imperialism’ is a different thing: an expansive, proactive form of foreign policy which may be developed by both states and empires. But there are non-imperialist empires as they are imperialist states, and viceversa.

Some confusion between ‘empire’ and ‘authoritarian command’ (close to the original meaning of ‘imperium’ in Latin) derives from the fact that many empires existed in the past when no formulas had been invented to make a vast territory and varied population compatible with democratic rule –as was noted by Jan Zielonka (Oxford U.). Only since the United States of America were created in the late eighteenth century, there can be and there are democratic ‘empires’, typically evolving into more stable federations. Among them we have nowadays–as was widely discussed in the ISA convention—the ongoing European Union.

It can even be hold that in modern times, ‘imperialist’ policies are more characteristic of states than of empires. The colonial empires were indeed built by the most powerful nation-states in Europe, especially Britain, France and Spain (but also by Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy and the rest). When those empires faded, those states experienced great internal crises. In particular, the lost of the next-to-last colonies of Spain at the Spanish–American war in 1898 generated an intellectual crisis of identity which is still visible and became the foundational moment for the Catalan and Basque nationalist movements in search for alternatives to Spain. The colonial crises of France in Indochina and Algeria provoked a military coup d’etat and the replacement of the Fourth Republic with the Fifth one in 1958. The lost of the British empire is seen by some analysts as a major factor in the emergence of the current Scottish nationalist movement. In fact, after the Second World War, the nation-states located at the center of the territory historically covered by the Holy German and Roman empire, as they lost their colonial empires, began to build a new empire among themselves, this time under market and democratic principles, that is, the current European Union. It’s still expanding and not yet a stable federation. This was the subject of mine and other papers in the ISA convention.

On building the American and the European ‘empires’

You can CLICK here.

In Catalan and Russian


Two recent appearances:

1) Empires in Russian

The largest part of my book Great empires, small nations has been published in Russian. It follows editions in Catalan (Proa), Spanish (Anagrama) and English (Routledge). The Russian translation forms a special issue of the journal Политическая наука (approx. pronounciation: Politicheskaia Nauka; approx. translation: Political studies), published by the Institute of International Relations, of the MGIMO University and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia.
The journal issue is titled ‘Empires, states and nations’, edited by Mikhail Ilyin, and also contains an interview with myself (Коломер) and an analysis of my book by Dr. Ilyin.



Информационный портал Московского государственного института международных отношений МИД Росси
CLICK

Reference:
Политическая наука
2008 г. №4
"Империи, государства, нации: многообразие политий в современном мире"

Summary:
Политическая наука: Сб. науч. тр. / РАН. ИНИОН, Росс. ассоц. полит. науки; Центр социал. науч.-информ. исслед. Отд. полит. науки; Ред. кол.: Ю.С. Пивоваров, гл. ред., и др. – М., 2008. – № 4: Империи, государства, нации:
Многообразие политий в современном мире /
Ред.-сост. вып. М.В. Ильин, Е.Ю. Мелешкина.

Already a review of this edition has appeared in another journal:
CLICK


Some previous reviews of the English edition of my book in Russian journals:

. . . . . . . . . . Перспективы . . . Журнальный зал . . . ИНТЕЛРОС
. . . . . . . . . . . . . CLICK . . . . . . . CLICK . . . . . . . . . CLICK




2) Obama in Catalan

On the day after president Barack Obama inauguration, I was interviewed on the news program of Television of Catalonia for 25 minutes.

To see the video, CLICK

Palestine Split

The war between Israel and Gaza shows, among many other things, the drawbacks of certain institutional provisions that can hinder new countries with frail democratic regimes. Within Palestine, strong polarization has developed between those in favor of acknowledging the state of Israel and building some kind of coexistence arrangement and those in favor of annihilating the Israelis by violent means. This polarization, however, has been strongly prompted and enlarged by disgraceful institutional design.

After the so-called Oslo Accords between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, concurrent presidential and parliamentary elections were held in Palestine in 1996. Yasser Arafat was chosen president, with 88 percent of votes. Yet, for the Legislative Council, a bizarre electoral system based on multi-seat districts by plurality rule gave Arafat’s party, the nationalist Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or ‘Opening’), which received only 31 percent of votes, an absolute majority of 63 percent of seats (55 out of 88).

The Legislative Council elaborated a provisional constitution for the Palestinian National Authority, to be enforced until full independence, which brought about long controversy between legislators and the president regarding the division of powers. The legislators managed to introduce the figure of a prime minister, to be submitted to confidence and censure by the Council, as in a parliamentary regime. But the president obtained the typical powers in a presidential regime, that is, the chairmanship of the armed forces and legislative veto (to be overridden only by a qualified majority of the Council), plus the power to dictate legislative decrees, the capacity to “direct the government”, and the faculty to declare the state of emergency without the Council’s approval. Arafat appointed a prime minister, but ceded to him neither the control of the security forces, which were crucial for internal appeasement, nor foreign representation to negotiate a stable settlement with Israel.

After Arafat’s death in 2005, there was a separate election for president. Mahmoud Abbas, from Fatah, was elected with 63 percent of votes, after the withdrawal of his main rival candidate from the islamist Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement). For the following legislative election in 2006, the number of seats was increased and the electoral system was changed to a mixed system of plurality rule and proportional representation. However, still a single candidacy, that of Hamas (running as ‘Change and Reform’), which obtained only 44 percent of votes, received an absolute majority of 56 percent of seats (74 out of 132).

Two separate powers, thus, emerged. Strong confrontation developed between president Abbas, who had been elected almost unopposed, and the Hamas party enjoying a fabricated majority in the Council. It eventually led to the split of the country between the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, each with a prime minister supported by each of the two parties. Now, Abbas in the West Bank has postponed the presidential election which should be held this year, while Hamas, absorbed in the war, does not even talk about having that kind of thing.


COMMENTS

Rein Taagepera said…

Yes,

The Arab states in general have a marked ability to play complex games with electoral rules -- more complex than they can understand. It's 19th-century Europe at its most bewildering -- and Europe had the excuse that they HAD to invent the wheel rather than reinvent it.

Electoral rules is one field where compromises may not be the best solution.

So I want to have a strong president and you want to have a PM dependent on parliamentary confidence?

Compromise: have both. Result: None.

Greetings,

Rein

Adrian Vogel said…

One simple question:

In this complex electoral situation where does female vote stand?

Which leads to another:

Can women vote under Hamas rule?

Thanks in advance for your answers

Matthew S. Shugart said...

Josep,

I saw your blog entry on Palestine's bad institutional design.

I wonder if you ever saw the analysis I did at my blog, which Rein actually cites in Predicting Party Sizes:

The Hamas sweep: The electoral system did it

(27 January 2006)

“Before the election, in surveying the electoral rules, I noted that a parallel mixed-member system in which the nominal tier was multi-seat plurality (in the form of multiple non-transferable vote) would tend to generate a highly disproportional result. With an average district magnitude in the nominal tier of around 4, the disproportionality would be expected to be quite high, because the relationship between district magnitude and proportionality under plurality rule is the opposite of that under PR: Higher magnitude, greater disproportionality. The Palestinian nominal tier includes one 9-seat district and other districts of 8, 7 and 6 seats each. Only four districts have fewer than three seats..."

See the full post: CLICK

Cheers,

Matthew

Merry Thinking

Just a selection of political thinkers to celebrate
(born more than 70 years ago).

CLICK on it for larger size (and print)

-384 -322 Aristotle

1469-1527 Niccolò Machiavelli

1588-1679 Thomas Hobbes

1632-1704 John Locke

1689-1755 Montesquieu

1711-1776 David Hume

1712-1778 Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1723-1790 Adam Smith

1724-1804 Immanuel Kant

1748-1832 Jeremy Bentham

1751-1836 James Madison

1805-1859 Alexis de Tocqueville

1806-1873 John S. Mill

1818-1883 Karl Marx

1864-1920 Max Weber

1883-1950 Joseph A. Schumpeter

1903-1957 John von Neumann

1915- Robert A. Dahl

1915- Paul Samuelson

1917- Maurice Duverger

1919- James M. Buchanan

1920-1993 William H. Riker

1921-1979 Stein Rokkan

1922- Gordon Tullock

1922-2006 Martin S. Lipset

1924- Giovanni Sartori

1926- Juan J. Linz

1930- Gary S. Becker

1930- Anthony Downs

1932-1998 Mancur Olson

1933- Amartya Sen

1933- Rein Taagepera

1936- Arend Lijphart

COMMENTS

Dear Josep:
Thank you for your nice Christmas card. I feel honored to be included
in your photo gallery of thinkers! Also a reminder, of course, that I
am over 70 years old (I don't really feel that old), but good to see,
too, that I am the "youngest" of your group!
I send you my best wishes for both a Happy Christmas and a successful
and happy 2009!
Arend

Arend Lijphart
Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Department of Political Science
University of California, San Diego

******

Thank you, Josep!

Arend: Lucky you that Josep did not draw a line at 75!

Rein

Rein Taagepera

University of California, Irvine

******

Rein,

The only person I could comfortably identify is that white haired guy in the lower left hand corner. (OK, so there were a couple of others, but they don't count.)

Best

Don

Donald G. Saari,

University of California, Irvine

******

Don,

I have not met most (understatement) of the others, for chronological reasons, among others, but the company seems acceptable.

Terveisin,

Rein

*******

Hi Josep,

Happy New Year and thanks for your wonderful blog, one of my favourites on the Blogger platform alongside Daniel Little's. I hope my redirection [CLICK] helped Chinese readers to get to your Chinese regime paper!

From a young political scientist who benefits immensely from your writings,
Fr.

François Briatte

University of Edinburgh

*******

Hello Josep,

Happy Holidays, Bones festes!

Lowell Lewis

University of California in Barcelona

*******

Feliz año para lo que te queda de 2008 y que sigas, en 2009 igual de supersabio que hasta ahora.

Manuel Portela

Agendadeprensa.com

Madrid

*******

Hi Josep,

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Cynthia

Cynthia McClintock

George Washington University

Washington DC

*******

Benvolgut Josep,

Et desitjo unes bones festes i millor 2009.

Una abraçada,

Xavier Batalla

La Vanguardia

*******

Dear Josep,
Merry Christmas!
Best,
Kaare

Kaare Strom

University of California, San Diego

******

Estimat Josep Maria,

Del blog realment admiro la diligencia i capacitat de contextualitzar el dia a dia amb la ciencia politica i viceversa. Aviu m'ha agradat poder posar a cara a tants 'colegues de professio'!

Gemma Sala

Grinnell College, Iowa

******

El Director del Instituto de Estudios Fiscales le desea una Feliz Navidad.

Madrid

******

Esperem que la postal del segle XXII pugui incloure alguna dona.

No es un retret, sinó la constatació d'una realitat.

Bones Festes

Teresa

Teresa García Mila

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

******

Josep Maria, he indentificat pràcticament a tothom a la teva postal de 'merrry thinking'. N'he posat uns quants -trets dels teus!- a la portada del meu llibre, com pots veure:

CLICK

Bon Nadal i millor Any Nou!

Salvador

Salvador Giner

Institut d'Estudis Catalans

*******

Josep, gracias por alimentar un año más tu blog. Mis mejores deseos por estas fechas y un feliz 2009.

Salud,

Manuel Hidalgo

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

More Scientific Politics

Rein Taagepera’s latest book should make a splash. With Making Social Sciences More Scientific, he could open a new period in the history of the mathematics used in political science, which has been successively importing techniques from sociology, economics, and now from physics.

First, on the negative side, Taagepera expands on his criticisms of usual techniques in “the predominant current” in political science and other disciplines. He claims that “a cancer is eating at the scientific study of society and politics: excessive dependence on linear regression” and other statistical techniques of data analysis. Many scholars and students get prisoners of and addicted to “canned computer programs”, which actually are unable to supply answers to most interesting questions.

Tagepera’s positive program is this: “Social sciences must advance in two directions. First, they must go beyond statistical approaches, into model building. Second, they must clean up their use of statistics.”
Taagepera's approach contrasts with the typical advise by some teachers of a generation or two ago: “let data speak”; we shouldn't do it simply because data don’t speak if we don’t present appropriate questions. Statistics does not provide models, but only tools to estimate a previously given model. “Construction of explanatory models can precede systematic data collection”. Emphasis should be put on thinking, “of the type it cannot be abdicated to computers”.

At building explanatory models based on relationships between variables, we should not be restricted to additions and subtractions, but adopt a wider menu with multiplications and divisions, powers and roots. Taagepera’s book provides a very helpful analysis of the mathematical formats of relationships (including linear, exponential, logistic, etc.) that should be expected from constraints of the variable values. For instance, when the variables can take only positive values, linear regression should be carried out on their logarithms. The book gives also very specific and useful advice on how to use statistical techniques, ranging from how to address the problems of causality to how to publish regression results

A powerful motivation for Taagepera “more scientific” social sciences is his conviction that a better science would make for better politics. He notes that much of the current social science, limited to a restricted set of methods and non-cumulative results, is largely unimpressive for outsiders, socio-political decision-makers included, and has little impact on the real world. “How much attention do politicians pay to political science or other social sciences?” –he asks. “We all know”… The reason is that “to the society at large, quantitative social scientists presently seem no better at prediction than qualitative historians, philosophers, and journalists –they just look more boring”… In contrast, “science becomes useful to practitioners only when it has reached a somewhat advanced stage of development”, as happened, most remarkably, with physics regarding engineering, but also to different extents with medicine to biology, business to economics, and should happen more with politics regarding political science.


My own illustration:
Three scientific formulations on the relationship between electoral systems and party systems.


“I expressed [the electoral system] effects in the formulation of three sociological laws: (1) a majority vote on one ballot is conducive to a two-party system; (2) proportional representation is conducive to a multiparty system…
It is also clear that the relationship between electoral and party systems is not a one-way phenomenon; if a one-ballot vote tends toward a two-party system, a two party system also favors the adoption of a single ballot voting system.

Maurice Duverger (1972).

“The total amount of explained variance is explained almost entirely by a single variable: the effective threshold [which is a function of the district magnitude M, later formulated as 75%/M+1]. Each percentage increase in the effective threshold reduces the effective number of elective parties by 0.06… All of the coefficients of the regressions of the dependent variables on the effective threshold… are statistically significant, usually at the 1 per cent level.”

Independent variable ----- Dependent variable
Effective threshold -------- Effective number of parliamentary parties
Coefficient: -0.05
Adjusted R2 = 0.28

Arend Lijphart (1994)

“When an assembly of S seats is elected in districts of M seats, the most likely number of seat-winning parties (No) is

No=(MS) 1/4

[furth root of the product M times S]

This means that, with a large number of cases, we expect one-half of them to fall above and one-half below the value No.”

Rein Taagepera (2007)

REFERENCE

Rein Taagepera, Making Social Sciences More Scientific. The Need for Predictive Models, Oxford University Press, 2008.


COMMENTS

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

Just a (legitimate) question mark: ?

GP

Bologna

“Don’t you agree…

that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?”

Larry Summers

just appointed director of the National Economic Council by president-elect Barack Obama, when he was president of Harvard University,

The Boston Globe, February 17^th, 2006 (CLICK)

COMMENTS

Enrico Spolaore said...

Josep,
but Larry Summers was right! (at least within the U.S. and using GRE results as a proxy for "smart")

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/larry-vindicated.html

ciao,
Enrico

Tufts University, Boston

Steve Coleman said...

The high ranking of economics majors on the GRE reflects mainly the quantitative dimension of the test. For the same reason, economics majors outscore political science majors, but are outscored by math and physics majors, on LSAT averages, but that probably does not make them better lawyers in itself. (Research shows that Law School actually diminishes students' ability for statistical reasoning.) The question I would pose is whether Law properly belongs in this system at all. As far as I can discern, the only true research--quantitative or qualitative--that law scholars do falls in the normal social science disciplines of political science, criminology, or sociology, where the bulk of that type of research is done. It would make more sense, I suggest, to put both Law and Political Science in with other social sciences.

Steve Coleman
Metropolitan State University
St.Paul, Minnesota

See GRE results

(Click on it for larger size):

The Best Academic Partners

The social sciences have developed at an impressive path during the last few decades, but they are yet not well represented within some of the best-established academic institutions. Just a few weeks ago, the Academia Europaea (in Latin), that is, the organization of “European scientists and scholars to promote learning, education and research”, has proposed to re-structure the current Social Sciences Section and create a number of new groups that would provide for a better disciplinary coherence and enlarge the membership in the different social sciences.

Since members of the Social Sciences section are invited to comment and discuss, I plan to collect opinions from colleagues here to be presented to the Academy within one month. All of you are invited to participate.

The initial proposal from the Academia Europaea Board does not sound very positive for Political Science. The three new Section groups would be:

1. Law and Political Sciences;

2. Economics (including Economic History, Business and Finance);

3. Sociology and Social Sciences (including Education, Geography and Demography).

As you can see, political scientists would be put together with lawyers, which seems to me a rather old-fashion pair. Indeed the dominion of law in political studies, which certainly promoted comparative studies on political regimes and structures from different regions and countries of the world, was strong until early twentieth century. But this persuasion was largely superseded with that of sociology, implying the diffusion of empirical, inductive methods, since mid-twentieth century, and the import of formal models, mathematical refinements and deductive reasoning from economics in the last few decades. All these contributions have been somehow cumulative. The scientific method indeed requires both empirical observations, quantitative measurements, and logical models. But the current developments in advanced research and graduate teaching do not seem to fit the coupling of Political science with Law. Please discuss.

Background:

The Academia Europaea was founded as recently as 1988, obviously helped by increasing integration within the European Union and the creation of the European Science Foundation and other research institutions. It has now some 2,300 members. It is organized in 16 sections, but only one section includes all the Social sciences (economics, geography, law, political science, demography, sociology), which together with the section in Behavioral sciences (anthropology, education and psychology) encompass only about 15 percent of all members.

The other 14 sections belong to two broad groups, respectively corresponding to humanities (with specific sections in History & Archaeology, Classics & Oriental studies, Linguistics, Literary & Theatrical, Musicology & History of Art and Architecture, Philosophy, Theology & Religion) and natural sciences (with sections in Mathematics, Informatics, Physics & Engineers, Chemical, Earth & Cosmic, Biochemistry & Molecular biology, Cell biology, Physiology & Medicine, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology). Indeed the “third culture” is crunched between the other two. Website: CLICK

For comparison, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which was crated in the flow towards the independence, in 1780, “to cultivate every art and science”, has now some 4,000 fellows (plus 600 foreign honorary members). It is organized in five “Classes”: Mathematics & Physics, Biology, Social sciences (in turn divided, as the other classes, into several sections: Psychology & Education, Economics, Political science, Law, and Sociology together with Anthropology, Demography & Geography), Humanities & Arts, and Public Affairs (including Business and Administration). The Social Sciences class encompasses about 20 percent of total membership. Website: CLICK

All comments very welcome.

COMMENTS

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Susan

A ‘New Era’ in America


The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has been greeted as the starting of a ‘new era’. There are several strands of academic literature about ‘historical cycles’, ‘critical elections’ and ‘voters’ realignments’ in American politics. The most recent contribution is a series of articles by Gary Miller and Norman Schofield (at Washington University in Saint Louis), based on the assumptions of a durable multidimensional issue space and a succession of changing party positions on that space.

Basically, Miller and Schofield identify two main dimensions: economy and culture, each including a number of issues with opposite party stances, such as industry-agriculture, business-labor on the former, and race, family and immigration on the latter. In the Figure below I adapt, simplify and update. Parties and candidates can be located for reference to the left and right poles on the economy dimension and the liberal and conservative poles on the culture dimension. The positions for the ‘new period’ presumably starting now are also included.

Since the current two-party system was established, several periods can be distinguished as follows:

1860-1928.

Major event and president: Republican A. Lincoln wins the Civil War.

Main issues: Abolition of slavery (culture liberal); industry development (economy center).
In 1896 the economy issue becomes more salient, with the Republican party taking a more pro-business position. The Democrats are electorally weakened by the Populists as third party.

Record: Republicans win 80% of presidential elections and 67% of House elections.

End: The financial crash of 1929 and further economic depression break support for the Republicans on the economy dimension.

1932-1964.

Major event and president: Democrat F.D. Roosevelt wins the Second World War.

Main issues: Government intervention (economy left); racial segregation in the South (culture conservative).

Record: Democrats win 77% of presidential elections and 97% of House elections.

End: Civil rights and sexual liberation movements break support for the Democrats on the culture dimension. Split of pro-segregation Southern candidacies.

1968-2004.

Major event and president: Republican R. Reagan wins the Cold War.

Main issues: Unregulated markets (economy right); family values (culture conservative).

Record: Republicans win 70% of presidential elections, although only 30% of House elections.

End: The financial crash of 2008 brakes support for the Republicans on the economy dimension.

See how, after 150 years of rotating around the clock, the two parties have almost completely alternated their respective positions. Democrat Obama is, thus, approaching Republican Lincoln's initial position.

Actually, Lincoln (of Illinois) was almost the only name mentioned by Obama in his victory speech in Chicago (Illinois).

REFERENCES

For a critical survey of past contributions by Key, Schattschneider, Sundquist, and Burnham:

David R. Mayhew, 'Electoral realignments', in Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 2000, pp. 449-74.

The most recent contribution, including references to previous works by the authors:

Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, 'The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.', Perspectives on Politics, 6, 3, September 2008, pp. 433-50.

COMMENTS

Salvador Giner said…

Very useful and illuminating!

Gianfranco Pasquino said…

Dear Josep,

You have done an excellent job in identifying different eras in US politics. The 2008 elections and their outcome do pose the problem whether a realignment is in the making. My impression is that, for the time being, one can see, at best, the beginnings of a significant process of electoral and, probably, political change. Hence, before speaking of "realignment", one should first redefine what we mean by it with the help of Key and Mayhew, second, look more closely to the data state by state and constituency by constituency, as done in the past by Walter Dean Burnham, finally wait for the outcome of the 2010 Congressional elections.
Let me conclude stressing that US elections are always extremely interesting and your blogs are very stimulating !

Best wishes
GP

Lowell Lewis and Montserrat Trueta said…

Hello Josep,

We enjoyed seeing you on TV in Barcelona this past week.

[it was on the US election]

Vote for Obama or McCain

Please see below the ballot for the United States election next Tuesday November 4th at the state of New York.
Colleagues from outside America (as well as curious Non-New Yorker Americans) may want to give a look at it, download it, print it, use it for teaching or other purposes.

CLICK on it for larger size:

Latin America in Disarray

In a recent visit to Mexico, last summer, I realized that the losers of the presidential election more than two years ago (which was discussed in the very first post of this Blog) do not yet recognize the incumbent president of the republic as a legitimate one. Meanwhile, kidnappings and assassinations by drug-traffickers rise up. The Mexican peso is falling down against foreign currencies. I found my colleagues and friends there more pessimistic than ever in the ten years since I went to Mexico for the first time.

In a lecture at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), I tried to summarize remote and recent factors of Mexico’s and Latin America’s failed expectations. It was in a very interesting International Colloquium on ‘Modernity and anti-modernity in Mexico’ organized by the schools (‘facultades’) of Sciences and of Humanities. This is my summary, and the full paper link below.

FRUSTRATED POLITICAL ‘MODERNITY’ IN LATIN AMERICA

A few basic elements of political ‘modernity’ imply the building of a sovereign nation state with representative government. There are several factors that can explain the relatively low levels of political ‘modernity’ in most countries in Latin America, including Mexico. They can be identified as for:

1) Legacies of the Spanish colony, which was strongly ‘ancient regime’, in contrast to more ‘modern’ dominations by other colonial metropolis.

2) Independence outcomes, especially territorial fragmentation in dispersion and the subsequent ethnic heterogeneities.

3) Institutional choices, strongly oriented towards the concentration of presidential power.

For three hundred years, Spanish colonial rule had been arranging or creating ancient regime, medievalizing social and economic structures in which no effective administration or clear or enforceable civil or private property rights were established.

Most Spanish colonies in North, Central, and South America arrived at their independence probably too early –by the early 19th century. At that time, the independence leaders could not rely upon prior governmental resources nor their own organizational or institutional capacity to structure political alternatives, voters, and electoral competition. The new independent republics were very weak states, in the sense that they attained very small levels of tax collection and public expenditure, tiny administrative structures, little law enforcement, and ineffective armies.

In situations of low population density and weak administrative and technical capacities, the new independent rulers were unable to project their control over large territories and incorporate dispersed and ethnically varied groups into a single institutional framework. Many provinces and towns were in the hands of generals, colonels, and lieutenants who, fearful of the large group's corresponding domination and invested in their own local relations, struck out on their own and separated from their previous allegiances.

In contrast to the unifying federal process in the former British territory in the North (where 13 initial units formed a broad union, lately enlarged to up to 50), the initial four Spanish viceroyalties organized in North-Central America, the continental Caribbean, the Andean region, and the Southern Cone very quickly split into a high number of 20 states of disparate size and composition. Several of the new smaller states and closed societies proved to be rather inviable, not having achieved minimal degrees of institutionalization and social and political stability in the ensuing two hundred years.

Continuing into the 21st century, majority or large portions of the population in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and several states in Mexico cannot communicate beyond their small local communities because they only speak unwritten local tongues. In general, racial segregation, discrimination, exclusion, rebellion, and conflict have remained very long-term features across the continent.

In conditions of ancient regime social structures, precarious state resources, small size, lack of common language, and isolation, any minor social conflict, unrest or riot within a state tends to become a general political crisis, fostering reactions and counter-reactions questioning the basis of the community itself. Massive and steady emigration –mostly to the United States—has been a distinctive feature of most countries in the region.

The new independence political leaders in 19th century Latin America tried to substitute weak states with strong governments. Unfortunately, they tried to strengthen the government by concentrating powers in the hands of a single individual –the regime formula usually known as 'presidentialism'. It was over weak administrative apparatuses, backward economies, territorial fragmentation, and ethnic dispersion that new destabilizing political institutions were unable to channel conflicts and even contributed to the promotion of political unpredictability and social clashes. The typical Latin American presidentialist concentration of power creates very small, weak, and contentious governments, which also further weakens the state. Especially in societies with low levels of income, high economic inequalities and ethnical heterogeneity, presidentialist governments tend to be alienated from society, politically both trouble-making and vulnerable, and highly unstable.

See the full paper:

CLICK

COMMENTS

Leandro Prados said...

Dear Josep,

I have just received the latest post in your blog, which I read regularly. Congratulations for an excellent work!

I am attaching some extension of my previous work, which will be published in the Journal of Latin American Studies in 2009.

Greets,

Leandro Prados de la Escosura
Professor of Economic History
Universidad Carlos III

Lost Decades? Economic Performance in Post-Independence Latin America

Abstract

In this paper economic performance in post-independence Latin America is assessed in comparative perspective. The release of the colonial fiscal burden was partly offset by higher costs of self-government, while opening up to the international economy represented a handmaiden of growth. Regional disparities increased since independence so easy generalizations cannot be established about the region’s long-run behaviour. On average, however, per capita income grew Latin America and though she fell behind to the U.S. and Western Europe, improved or kept its relative position to the rest of the world. ‘Lost decades’ appears as an unwarranted depiction of the period c.1820-c.1870.

International Political Science Association said...

Dear Dr. Colomer,

Your work is now on our website. See the Members books section at www.ipsa.org

Cordially,

--

Membership & External Relations / Adhésions et des relations externes

International Political Science Association / Association internationale de science politique

Montréal (Québec), Canada.

Economic Crisis Favors Incumbent Governments

The ongoing financial and economic crisis may bring about a major political turning point. Let us just consider the following observations: the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, was judged to be politically sunk just a few weeks ago, when survey polls showed the labour party 20 percentage points behind the opposition; however, as the stock markets have fallen in recent weeks, Brown has risen in the polls up to the point to contemplate a full recovery in electoral expectations. Similarly, while banks and markets fall down, Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and Berlusconi in Italy get increasing support in public opinion in front to divided and ineffective oppositions. Also Zapatero, for one, won the election in Spain a few months ago by reaching not to talk very much about the impending economic recession, but now that it is dramatically visible the opposition is neither obtaining much benefit.

All this suggests that the relation between economic performance and governments’ accountability can be changing in an important way. Traditional political science models of ‘economic voting’ assumed that voters rewarded or punished the incumbent rulers for the country’s economic performance during the most recent period. According to observations across a wide range of countries, voters would evaluate incumbent rulers in ‘retrospect’ to make them accountable for the economy because they believed that government’s actions effectively impinged on issues such as employment, economic growth and inflation. However, greater economic interdependence may be changing voters’ perceptions. Specifically, the international scope of the current crisis may be triggering a turn in favor of incumbent governments as a consequence of both a sense of government’s impotence and a reaction to seek refuge into the hands of the sitting rulers in times of emergency –in a similar way as it tends to happen with natural disasters, terrorist attacks or external aggressions.

This hypothesis has been tested with more than 400 state-wide elections in 75 democratic countries since 1975 in a recent article by Timothy Hellwig (University of Houston) and David Samuels (University of Minnesota). The authors basically regress the change in percentage of votes received by the incumbent head of government’s party regarding the previous election on the annual percentage change in real per capita GDP and the degree of internationalization of the country’s economy in terms of trade and capital flows. The author’s findings strongly support the argument that economic internationalization reduces voters’ propensity to connect domestic economic performance and incumbent merits. In their words, “voters residing in more closed economies are likely to sanction national leaders for past performance outcomes, but voters in open economies are relatively less likely to attribute reward or blame to domestic politicians for economic performance”.

Indeed, these days voters seem increasingly aware of the limits of domestic policy makers in controlling the economy, as the examples mentioned at the beginning of this note suggest. Politicians, in turn, also tend to blame the current financial crisis on economic and policy factors beyond their control and originated in other countries, particularly in the United States. Only in America the incumbent party’s candidate, John McCain, is being significantly hurt at the survey polls by the current housing and financial crisis, in spite of his limited involvement in the economic policies of the past period, but according to the conventional model of domestic accountability.

Two major implications can be drawn from this noteworthy turn. First, if economic internationalization reduces electoral accountability of incumbent rulers, the relevance of state-level democracies may be questioned again. Second, as Hellwig and Samuels just suggest at the very end of their article, we should now inquiry whether responsibility attributions may shift onto other political actors, including especially international and local governments. At the European Union level, at least, the coming elections to the European Parliament could become a major occasion for replacing the voters’ usual domestic motivations with the capability to advance Europe-wide concerns and identification of responsibilities.

REFERENCE

Timothy Hellwig and David Samuels, ‘Voting in Open Economies. The Electoral Consequences of Globalization’, Comparative Political Studies, 40, 2007.

COMMENTS

José Fernández-Albertos said...

Very interesting. It’s not that ?I said so’ because one of the co-authors., Hellwig, has a previopus article, which I cite. But it might be interesting [see below]

IBEI, Barcelona

Does Internationalisation Blur Responsibility?

Economic Voting and Economic Openness in 15 European Countries

José Fernández-Albertos

(Published in West European Politics, Vol. 29, No. 1, 28 – 46, January 2006)

Summary

In economic voting models, the electorate punishes governments associated with bad economic results and rewards those who provide prosperity. However, citizens do not always place the same weight on economic considerations when deciding their vote. This weight, it is argued, is a function of the degree to which governments can be deemed responsible for domestic economic outcomes. More precisely, the article hypothesises that when the economy is highly vulnerable to external economic conditions (and thus less controllable by the national government), voters will value less the information they receive on the state of the economy, and, as a consequence, electoral behaviour will be less influenced by economic performance. This conjecture is tested empirically using survey data from 15 European countries. Consistently with the prediction, it is found that employment expectations matter more the greater the degree of economic closeness of the country. General economic expectations have an impact on voting regardless of the level of economic openness, and no sign of pocketbook voting is detected. Also, the evidence seems to suggest that the internationalisation of the economy plays an exonerating role only under left-wing governments.

On the Politics of the Financial Crisis

1

The different ways governments try to face the current international financial crisis may cast light on several aspects of the political process. In the face of the United States Congress’ resistance to accept the White House initial diktat and the further delay, there may be the temptation to praise the alternative formula, that is, the concentration of power typical of the British-style political system in which the executive is formed by a single party with an absolute majority of seats in parliament. Indeed in the last few months the current British government has done a few things that it wanted to do immediately, including the nationalization of a couple of banks. However, most countries in Europe have complex institutions involving multiparty coalition cabinets, separate elections for president and the assembly, or bicameral, federal states. Actually, during the last twelve months, the United States government and the different state governments in Europe if counted together have executed bailouts and takeovers of financial services companies whose reported assets sum up to similar amounts –roughly around 5 trillion dollars on each side of the Atlantic (my own estimate from data in IHT, 1 Oct 08, although the numbers change every day).

At the European Union level, as at the United States level, decision-making also unavoidably requires multistate, multilevel and multiparty agreements through institutional structures of division of powers. Some relatively well-established opinion usually stresses the weaknesses of the European Union to act as effectively when sudden decisions are needed. But, as shown these days, the most usual situation in the United States --divided government with the president’s party not having a majority in Congress, the Senate vulnerable to ‘filibuster’ delays, and the congressional parties being highly individualistic--- implies that decisions can also be reached only through multi-sided negotiations and compromises. Generally, further reflection on initial proposals elaborated by one or two individuals, as the Paulson-type plan (which pretended to launch discretionary and non-reviewable decisions not submitted to accountability by any court of law or administrative agency), collective deliberation, integration of different interests, and second thoughts tend to produce better decisions than hasty pronouncements.

2

Another relevant political aspect of the current financial crisis is that it contributes to setting the agenda of the electoral campaign for the U.S. presidential election. As evidence that not only structural variables, but also the candidates and the campaign issues matter for the election result, as discussed before in this Blog, let me quote the forecast of somebody active in the campaign. This was one month ago, at the beginning of September, just after the two party conventions which produced a close tie between the two candidates in the survey polls:

“‘If in October we’re talking about Russia and national defense and who can manage America in a difficult world, John McCain will be president’, predict[ed] Thomas Rath, the leading Republican strategist in the swing state of New Hampshire. ‘If we’re talking largely about domestic issues and health care, Barack Obama probably will be president’. Events can affect that conversation [added the reporter]. If Russia invades another country on Oct. 20 or Iran detonates a nuclear weapon, advantage McCain; if there’s another Bear Stearns meltdown, or a stock market crash, put a few points on the Obama side." (NYT, Sep. 7, 2008).

This was one month ago. Nowadays, survey polls seem to give strongly support to that forecast. But one long more month still lies ahead.

COMMENTS

Jan-Erik Lane said...

The biggest insights that the present global financial crisis offer is into political economy. What is happening with such a drastic or dramatic amplitude shows inter alia:
1) Financial institutions have Zero competence in principal-agent gaming.
2) Financial markets are determined by "animal spirits" rather than by rational choice.
3) The Chicago School Economics' teachings around the efficient market hypothesis in combination with  rational expectations are outdated and will need comprehensive revision to take into account the implications of both strategy and rumor. 
4) Government comes BEFORE markets, as markets do not automatically stabilize themselves.

jan 

Geneva

Guillem López-Casasnovas said...

The financial world is not what it was, nor will it be so ever again in the future. There are so many direct and structured, lateral and colateral products in the market place, so many intermediary agents and emerging nominees, so many players present in the new global market and such dominant interests at stake that the future of retail and investment banking is quite unknown.

Such a process of innovation has been developed thanks to significant financial engineering from a new way of understanding financial activities, favoured by extraordinary liquidity, essentially from emerging countries and sovereign funds. Recycling dollars derived from oil (currently volatising prices at a higher level than ever in the past) and revenues from the currencies of developing countries (economies that show two-digit growth and with rates of saving three times ours) has changed definitively the situation. To this new balance on international financial powers we must add the situation provoked by the current (and expected) future increases in the cost of food and some other raw basic materials. No turning back.

G. López-Casasnovas

Professor in Public Economics                                                                       

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona

Fair Representation

‘The ideal of representative democracy –one-man, one-vote—is simple, but to meet it is not… No man should have a greater voice than another: a state should receive a number of representatives in proportion to its population or a party in proportion to its total vote. It seems that to say ‘proportional’ is enough to solve the problem of apportionment –to make a precise allocation of seats to states or to parties—but it is not.’

At the recent meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), I had the honour and the pleasure to deliver the George H. Hallett Award to two colleagues that made an outstanding contribution to solve the just mentioned problem of ‘apportionment’ and approach ‘the ideal of representative democracy’. The APSA’s section on Representation and Electoral Systems gives annually this award ‘to the author of a book published at least 10 years ago that has made a lasting contribution’. This year, the jury, as appointed by the current chair of the section, André Blais (University of Montreal), was chaired by Shaun Bowler (University of California at Riverside) and formed by Douglas Amy (Mount Holyoke College) and myself. The award was given to a mathematician and an economist:

Michel Balinski (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris CLICK)
and Peyton Young (Oxford University CLICK),
for their book Fair Representation. Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote,
first published in 1982: CLICK
(from which the quote at the first paragraph).

As Balinski and Young say, ‘the appeal of the problem lies in its unique combination of history, politics, and mathematics’. Specifically, their book:
• called the attention to the importance of the problem of apportionment and the politics behind it;
• developed an extensive empirical analysis of apportionment in the United States;
• made an innovative contribution on the historic origins of the mathematical formulas of proportional representation in the late 18th century USA, which were used for apportionment of seats among states on the basis of inhabitants, but are the same formulas as for allocation of seats to parties on the basis of votes that were reinvented in late 19th century Europe;
• and perhaps even more interesting, they clarified the mathematical mechanisms by which different electoral formulas are associated to different numbers of candidacies and of parties with seats.
Balinski and Young say that no one method of apportionment gives ‘a perfectly fair solution’. They mostly favor the Webster-Saint Laguë (for the American and the European inventors, respectively) formula. But they also acknowledge that ‘it may sometimes be desirable to … deliberately give an advantage to the larger parties so as to encourage the formation of coalitions’ and durable governments, which might favour the Jefferson-d’Hondt formula.

Fair Representation was reprinted by the Brookings Institution in 2001, which proofs its contribution is lasting.

The Hallet Award previous recipients

2007: Gary Cox, Making Votes Count. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

2006: Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments. New York: Free Press, 1967.

2005: V.O. Key, Jr. Southern Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

2004: Douglas J. Amy, Real Choices/New Voices. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

2003: Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and Development of Political Parties in Victorian England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

2002: David E. Butler and Donald E. Stokes, Political Change in Britain. New York: Palgrave, 1976.

2001: Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart, Choosing an Electoral System: Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences. Agathon, 1986.

2000: G. Bingham Powell, Contemporary Democracies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

1999: Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart, Seats and Votes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

1998: Richard Katz, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

1997: Harold Gosnell, Why Europe Votes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.

1996: Roy Pierce and Philip Converse, Political Representation in France. New York: Belknap Press, 1986.

1995: Arend Lijphart, Democracies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

1994: W.J.M. McKenzie, Free Elections. London: Allen and Unwin, 1958.

1993: Enid Lakeman, How Democracies Vote. London: Faber and Faber, 1970.

1992: Robert G. Dixon, Democratic Reapportionment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

1991: Hannah F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

1990: Maurice Duverger, Political Parties. John Wiley & Son, 1954. Originally published by Armand Coplin under the title Les Partis Politiques.

1989: Douglas Rae, Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

George Hervey Hallett was a mathematician who became a scholar, author and public servant, active in campaigning for proportional representation (PR) in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, especially from the League for PR and the National Municipal League.

APSA’s section on Representation and Electoral Systems:
CLICK

COMMENTS

Salvador Giner said...

Dear Professor Colomer,

I enjoyed your comments on Balinski and Young. While I understand that apportionment entails a puzzle -or a number of puzzles- for political science, I remain somewhat skeptical about the answers it has thus far provided. The question of 'democratic competence' still remains open. Why should well-informed, responsible and law-abiding citizens have the same right to elect their representatives as hoodlums or ignoramuses? I suspect that little progress will be made on the issue of the uneven distribution of democratic competence over a given population, unless this thorny question -which classical political philosophy squarely faced, from Aristotle to Tocqueville and Mill- is faced anew.

Yours ever,

Salvador

[President of the Catalan Academy (Institut d’Estudis Catalans),] Barcelona

Jorge Urdanoz said...

Josep,

The award was certainly deserved. Fair Representation was written more than 25 years ago and remains the basic reference in the field of electoral proportionality. In my opinion, after this work only the field of thresholds has moved forward (see especially Alberto Penadés: http://www.march.es/ceacs/publicaciones/working/archivos/2007_234_en.pdf), since I do not think that Gallagher's doctrine on the different notions of proportionality (and on different ways of measuring it) poses a greater clarification with respect to Balinski and Young.

Part of the title ("the ideal of one man, one vote") could be read from a normative perspective, as professor Giner seems to have made. Although the book actually does not deal at all with that point of view, in my understanding the response to that "thorny issue" can be only one: equal vote, irrespective to the wisdom of voters. That is what defines democracy. It is the regime in which the “demos” has equal power, in contrast to any other model of political organization. I do not see any necessity to renew this question: it was raised from Aristotle to Mill precisely because all these authors were not democrats (Mill is somehow the border line, with his statements about "plural" vote).

Sincerely,

Jorge Urdanoz

Columbia University, New York

Can Obama Win?

At the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting, which took place in Boston last week, we were given several forecasts for the coming United States presidential election, to be held on November 4th. This kind of guesses is usually presented in the APSA meetings every four years, although with limited success so far.

Referring to controversies in previous occasions, Michael S. Lewis-Beck (University of Iowa) and Charles Tien (Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY) stated: “The statistical modelers are back. The presidential election forecasting errors of 2000 [when they predicted a comfortable victory of Al Gore] did not repeat themselves in 2004. On the contrary, the forecasts, from at least seven different teams, were generally quite accurate”.

Their “Jobs model” looks as follows:

Vote = f (Presidential Popularity, Economic Growth, Jobs Creation, Incumbency Advantage).

They predict an Obama popular vote of 50.3%.

See the paper here: CLICK

Alan I. Abramowitz (Emory University) applies the “time-for-change model”, postulating that the popular vote for president can be accurately predicted before the national conventions based on three factors: the incumbent president’s approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the second quarter of the election year, and the length of time that the president’s party has controlled the White House.

Barack Obama is predicted to receive 55.1 % of the major party vote to 44.9 % for John McCain. He bets that a Democratic victory in November is “all but certain”.

Paper: CLICK

Along similar lines, Robert S. Erikson (Columbia University) and Christopher Wlezien (Temple University) project from the index of “leading economic indicators” and opinion polls.

Their forecasts point to a cautious prediction in favor of Barack Obama with 52.2% and a 72% probability of popular vote victory.

Paper: CLICK

Alternatively, Helmut Norpoth (Stony Brook) uses the “primary model” holding that the voting in presidential primaries is a leading indicator of the vote in the general election.

He predicts that Barack Obama would edge John McCain by the slimmest of margins, 50.1 to 49.9% of the major-party vote (which is within one unit of the standard error).

Interestingly, the “primary model” suggests that Hillary Clinton would have done somewhat better against McCain, while, in contrast, Republicans could not have picked a stronger nominee than McCain from the field of candidates in the primaries.

Paper: CLICK

Somewhat more innovatively, Alfred G. Cuzán and Charles M. Bundrick (University of West Florida) use “the fiscal model” of presidential elections. This model rests on the premise that the share of the two-party vote going to the incumbent party is inversely related to changes in federal spending (relatively to Gross Domestic Product), so that the more the federal government “charges” the citizens for its services, the fewer votes the government’s party gets.

They anticipate that the incumbent Republicans will lose the White House in a close election, taking about 48% of the two-party vote.

Paper: CLICK

Andrew H. Sidman (CUNY) and Maxwell H. H. Mak (Stony Brook) adopt a different approach based on multiple state-level forecasts instead of a single forecast at national level. This increases the number of observations and allows for translating popular votes into votes in the electoral college.

They predict that, in an election that may actually be too close to call, Barack Obama will be elected with 295 electoral votes over John McCain with 243 electoral votes.

Paper: CLICK

Carl Klarner (Indiana State University) also analyzes district- and state-level factors for both the congressional and the presidential elections.

Obama is predicted to get 53% of the popular vote and 346 electoral votes and have an 84% chance of winning the presidency. He adds, however, that “racial considerations” regarding the candidate “could result in a Democratic defeat”.

Paper: CLICK

See a summary of the forecasts of these and a few other “quantitative models” here: CLICK

In a previous piece published two years ago, I argued that this kind of empirical exercises would work better if they were supported by a more clearly specified model or hypothesis about the likely relationship between relevant variables. Usually, these forecasts do not discuss explicitly an initial model on the basis of reasonable assumptions regarding voters’ motivations or parties’ or candidates’ platforms. The exercises mentioned combine structural and conjunctural variables and opinion polls in a crude linear additive regression statistical model. Over successive elections, the most veteran forecasters have introduced numerous changes in the set and measurement of variables, but driven only by retrospective corrections, trial and error.

See my critique in pages 7-9 here: CLICK

Any comment very welcome!

COMMENTS

Robert D. Putnam said...

Thanks for this very handy, thoughtful summary.

Harvard University

Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard said…

See also Douglas A. Hibbs' "Implications of the ‘bread and peace’ model for the 2008 US presidential election" in the new issue of "Public Choice" (Volume 137, Numbers 1-2 / October, 2008), which is less ad hoc than a lot of these other models.

Copenhagen, Denmark

‘Implications of the ‘Bread and Peace’ Model for the 2008 US Presidential Election’ By Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr. (Gothenburg University, Sweden)

Abstract

Presidential election outcomes are well explained by just two objectively measured fundamental determinants: (1) weighted-average growth of per capita real personal disposable income over the term, and (2) cumulative US military fatalities owing to unprovoked, hostile deployments of American armed forces in foreign conflicts. The US economy weakened at the beginning of 2008 and average per capita real income growth probably will be only around 0.75% at Election Day. Moreover cumulative US military fatalities in Iraq will reach 4,300 or more. Given those fundamental conditions, the Bread and Peace model predicts a Republican two-party vote share centered on 48.2%.

Forthcoming in Public Choice, September 2008

Blog:

James E. Campbell (University at Buffalo, SUNY) is the first to give us a prediction on the basis of variables including a post-convention opinion poll. He is also the first to predict a victory of John McCain:

James E. Campbell said...

Trial-heat poll & second quarter GDP (half for successors) [also convention bump model]

52.7% of popular vote for McCain with 57 83% probability of winning.

"although with limited success so far" I do not believe that this is a fair characterization. "Limited success" suggests that the forecasts have not done that well and this is inaccurate. Some forecasts have done quite well, even in 2000. As for the record last time out, I wrote in PS after the election: "From a collective standpoint, 2004 was a good year for the seven forecasts presented in the October PS. Two forecasts (Wlezien and Erikson, Lewis-Beck and Tien) were in the quite accurate range; two (Abramowitz, Campbell) were in the reasonably accurate range; and one (Norpoth) was in the fairly accurate range. One (Holbrook) was in the inaccurate range and one (Lockerbie) was very inaccurate. This was joined in the stratosphere of errors by the prediction from the leading forecasting model in economics. The venerable economist Ray Fair’s late July forecast of a 57.5% Bush vote was a whopping 6.3% greater than the actual vote (Fair 2004)."

Buffalo, NY

September 8th

Rein Taagepera said...

While very much hoping for Obama to win, I am only cautiously optimistic.

None of these models based on previous US elections could include a correction factor for one of the major candidate being black, because this situation hasn't occurred yet.

Recall Los Angeles Mayor Bradley who ran ahead in all polls but lost the race for governor of California to Deukmejian. He was black. Visibly, there are voters who are ashamed of their motives. So they tell the pollsters one thing and vote different in the end. Many US political scientists wonder about this "Bradley effect".

We had a similar situation in Estonia during the Singing Revolution. The degree of success of ethnically Estonian candidates was accurately forecast by opinion polls. The degree of success of ethnically Russian candidates was misrepresented by opinion polls. The Russian voters polled liberal, then voted reactionary.

Tartu (Estonia), before picking up the Skytte Prize in Uppsala and returning to Irvine (California) on 30 September.

This Blog has been a little sleepy for a while, due to the author’s absorption with completing a new, long book (of which there will be notice in due time).

As for the previous period, every new post in this Blog is initially announced to about one thousand people (about half in Europe and half in America). Comments here can thus have many readers and some impact. All of you are kindly invited again to participate.

The New Frontier of the Russian Empire

On the Olympic inauguration day, the Russia army invaded another country, for first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Georgia’s prime minister immediately evoked past Soviet occupations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Colleagues with alternative points of view have coincided in making references to the resurgence of the Cold War and the evanescence of peacemaking globalization (for example, Robert Kagan, in WP CLICK, Paul Krugman, in IHT CLICK).

Actually the Georgian conflict can be understood as part of the fight for the establishment of frontiers and borders between the Russian empire and the European empire. A few points can be remarked from the perspective I presented in my booklet Great Empires, Small Nations, published a few months ago (I adapt quotations from there).

There is no such thing as ‘globalization’, but a world of empires

“In the current world, almost no market or public good is really ‘global’, in the sense of covering the full area of the earth’s ‘globe’… The transnational circulation of persons, goods, services and capital has increased substantially since the mid-twentieth century… But although the total amount of transnational trade is increasing, each ‘imperial’ area captures a rather stable share of total world trade. The only economies whose shares of world trade have clearly increased at higher rates than their shares of world production are those of the European Union (up to generating more than 40 percent of world trade)…There is a clear trend toward ‘imperial’-sized blocs – especially North America, Europe and East Asia…Trade is indeed becoming more concentrated over time within a few large empires of the world. It is not likely that they will completely merge and lead the world economy to global free trade anytime soon.”

As is typical of empires, neither Russia nor the EU has fixed territorial limits

“The initial European Community, which had six member states in 1957, has gradually enlarged, up to 27 members in 2007, and there are still more than a dozen potential candidates for membership. The territorial limits for an empire are only those of another empire. In this case a logical limit of the EU should be Russia, which has been shrinking since the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1991… When riots and threats of civil war have exploded in bordering states, the EU has promoted their liberalization and democratization, as happened most recently in Serbia and in some former republics of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Georgia. Membership to the EU creates economic and political links able to prevent future military conflicts. For almost all countries, membership of the EU is also linked to membership of NATO and other Western military alliances.

The Russian and the European frontiers

“The EU might stop its fifty-year process of steady expansion short of the limits of Russia, which would produce frustrated expectations and perhaps significant discontent and instability among the excluded… Recent new members and possible candidates for European membership have proved to be nonviable states outside a large empire… By discarding several new candidates to join, the EU risks relegating a number of countries in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to a ‘backyard’, out of which may arise conflict, instability and a permanent flow of immigrants.”

Imperial peace?

“A very large empire implies that no exclusionary borders exist within its territory and, therefore, the occasions for interterritorial conflicts are lower than in a setting of numerous sovereign, mutually hostile states… A world organized in a few empires implies a shorter total length of borders and, therefore, fewer lines of potential conflict than one organized in many sovereign states. But indeed external imperial borders tend also to be conflictive, especially if they neighbor other empires [as it is being shown in the current conflict in Georgia]. Regretfully, a single-government world is not foreseeable from historical developments.

REFERENCE

Josep M. Colomer, Great Empires, Small Nations. Routledge, 2007. CLICK

COMMENTS

Edelberto Torres said...

Estimado amigo: esta vez fallaste en tus apreciaciones.  Hasta Gorbachev lo ha dicho: ¿Qué hace EEUU en Georgia? ¿Hasta alli llegan sus fronteras?  Es imposible olvidar la historia: EEUU invadió Grenada solo porque el aeropuerto lo estaban construyendo obreros cubanos; antes habia invadido República dominicana (1963) y antes, a Guatemala (1954)  ¿Dónde termina la frontera norteamericanaa?   No tengo simpatía por Rusia ni por Putin, tampoco por Bush, que es peor.

United Nations Development Program, Guatemala

Josep Colomer said...

Yes, the Caribbean Sea was the 'frontier' of the United States from the Spanish-American War until the Cold War, when the Soviet communist influence was notorious in the region. My point is that the Caucasus is the current frontier of Russia. The attempts of the U.S. to have influence there are also notorious. But a key difference with the Caribbean in the past is that it's the European Union that has its frontier and undetermined borders there.

Richard Rose said…

Josep,

If you are taking up an interest in Russia, the RIW documents that the frontier may not be so new, and Georgia a reminder of old frontier. I spent an interesting week in Tbilisi in April, where various Georgians were looking for protection from an impulsive and not exactly democratic president!

Professor Richard Rose FBA
Director, Centre for the Study of Public Policy
University of Aberdeen,
ABerdeen AB24 3QY Scotland

Do Russians See Their Future in Europe or the CIS?

Richard Rose & Neil Munro

Abstract

Historic differences between Russian elites about where the country’s future lies are here addressed by examining what the Russian public thinks, using data from the New Russia Barometer survey. More than two thirds see the country’s future with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and less than one third see it with Europe. Alternative explanations for these differences are tested statistically. The most important influences making Russians look to the near abroad are traditional identities, national pride and age. Although cosmopolitan contacts of individuals with the West encourage people to be pro-European, Russians are likely to continue to view their world as a CIS space. However, this does not indicate a popular demand to re-establish Imperial dominance but rather a durable commitment among most Russians to a Eurasian rather than European view of the world.

Russia is not a country; it is a world. (Russian saying)

Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, January 2008, 49 – 66 

Does Europe Stop (again)?

What would have happened if one of the Massachusetts delegates in the Convention in Philadelphia, July 1787, had voted against certain institutional arrangements for a federal American Union? According to Bill Riker’s brilliant speculation “the United States would have remained a loose confederation… America would be merely a set of nations, some successful, some not… The absence of the United States… would make the world a very different place from what it actually has become” (edited by Nelson Polsby).

May something like this happen with the European Union now, after Ireland has failed to ratify the treaty reorganizing its institutions? Other transatlantic scholars grimly predict that Europe might slide into global irrelevance. See, in contrast, what I said in the last paragraphs of my edited book Comparative European Politics, just published these days .

“The most prominent institutional changes put forward [by the now suspended Lisbon treaty] include the following: the Parliament would enlarge its legislative and budgetary powers; the Council should replace unanimity rule with double qualified majority rule in new fields (but not on justice and home affairs); the president of the Commission should be elected, as it is, by the Council and the Parliament, but ‘taking into account the parliamentary elections’; and the presidency of the European Council, instead of rotating every six months, would be appointed for periods of two and a half years, renewable once, so up to five years, coinciding with the terms of the Parliament. All these changes would certainly favor a more federal working of the EU institutions. But they would not diminish the consensual mode of decision-making which has characterized fifty years of Europe-building in democracy, prosperity and peace.

Indeed political pluralism and consensus have been the rule in the European Union… Consensus and agreements among European states are fostered by the actors’ sense of having a long past and an expected long future in common. Concessions can be made on some issues in the expectation of compensations on others. The long history of permanent conflicts and increasingly frequent and bloody inter-state wars, as well as the challenges derived from new technological changes and the subsequent enlargement of the scales of human interactions, make relevant European actors aware of the potentially very high costs of major disagreements within the European Union. ‘Unity in diversity’ is also strengthened by sanctioning mechanisms to enforce EU decisions, which have in fact been accepted as obligatory devices by the member-states’ representatives…

Starting in the aftermath of the intra-European civil war called the Second World War, and during a period of more than fifty years, the European Union has followed a … path to eradicate war and establish security, create a great common market and set the institutional frame for the provision of large-scale public goods over an extended territory. As have been shown in this chapter, the outline of a potentially more democratic and efficient federal union in Europe is basically designed and positively tested. Probably the most crucial decision ahead of the EU is the establishment of clear borders of the union, which appears to be a condition for further stability, consolidation and progress."

COMMENTS

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

Most certainly, it does not run. While I generally agree with your statements, I think that even a consensual democratic experiment cannot do without decisions taken regardless of unanimity. Second, I would stress that it is time now to decide that a Europe working according to two different speeds not only is not a bad idea, but it might put a healthy pressure on several governments and their respective societies and public opinions. Perhaps, the focus of future analysis ought to be put, without underestimating the importance of the European institutions, on political leadership and European political parties.

Gianfranco Pasquino

Bologna

Jan-Erik Lane said...

Why does the EU have to move? Towards what?
I cannot understand why it is not enough to implement what has already been decided. Organisations that expand too fast become castles on the see-saws - they will thus crumble sooner or later. Put the emphasis upon stability and secure what has already been accomplished.

jan

Geneva

SOURCE:

Routledge are pleased to announce a NEW textbook, Comparative European Politics, Third Edition I would like to give you the opportunity to order an Inspection Copy. July 2008: 246x174: 328pp Pb: 978-0-415-43756-1: £22.99 Table of Contents 1. Introduction Josep M. Colomer 2. Great Britain and Ireland: Variations in Party Government Ian Budge 3. Germany: The Grand Coalition State Manfred G. Schmidt 4. France: The Institutionalization of Leadership Yves Mény 5. Italy: The Never Ending Transition of a Democratic Regime Gianfranco Pasquino 6. Spain and Portugal: Rule by Party Leadership Josep M. Colomer 7. The Low Countries: Confrontation and Coalition in Segmented Societies Hans Keman 8. The Nordic Countries: Compromise and Corporatism in the Welfare State Jan-Erik Lane and Svante Ersson 9. The European Union: A Federal, Democratic Empire? Josep M. Colomer Comparative European Politics, Third Edition is a clear, comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the institutional regimes of countries in Western Europe written by an outstanding group of political scientists. Completely revised and updated throughout, this edition provides a complete coverage of individual countries, groups of countries and the European Union allowing readers to draw sophisticated comparisons. It is written to a common template so that each chapter explores political parties, elections and electoral rules, parliaments, local, regional and state governments, and the relations between domestic institutions and the European Union. Author Josep M. Colomer is the author of Great Empires, Small Nations (2007), Political Institutions (2001) and editor of the Handbook of Electoral System Choice (2004). Order your Copy If you would like to receive an Inspection Copy of this title*, simply send a message to martin.robinson@informa.com with the following information: Name and Academic Postal Address Course Name & Code Course Level (e.g. 1st Year Undergraduate) Course Duration (e.g. 1 Semester) Course Start Date Course Size And I will be happy to arrange this for you. If you have any additional requirements for your course please let me know and I will be happy to assist. Kind regards, Martin Robinson Textbook Marketing Co-ordinator

The Invisible Hand in Politics

I have participated in a transatlantic conference on ‘The Design of Democratic Institutions’, organized by the Political Science and Political Economy (PSPE) Group of the London School of Economics.

In the paper (which is linked below), I use the 'invisible hand' term in the metaphorical sense in which it has also been used in economics and other fields. In this case, the metaphor suggests that while political actors choosing political institutions intend gains for themselves in terms of having access to power, they tend to favor the diffusion of power among multiple potential actors.

The point is that the diffusion of power can be both a criterion for good governance and a prudent choice by power-seeking actors. Good governance can be estimated for the inclusiveness of citizens in the participation processes and the fit between policy-making decisions and citizens’ preferences. From this perspective, institutions favoring the diffusion of power, such as universal suffrage, multiple governments and institutions dealing with different issues, and multiple political parties with opportunities to access or share power, can be considered relatively good to the extent that they create wider opportunities for people's participation and influence in decision-making than those favoring the concentration of power into a single government, group or political party.

At the same time, it can be assumed that the choice of political institutions is usually driven by politicians' and would-be rulers' ambition, the search for power, and calculations, estimates or expectations about the likely consequences of different institutional formulas to favor choosers’ self-interest. But a socially efficient institutional design can result from circumstances in which no actor has sufficient influence to impose its own project and diverse ambitions counterweight each other. Major institutional choices are then made in favor of formulas able to produce the diffusion of power and to satisfy broad groups of people.

The fact is that, in the current world, the number of small countries increases; the number of democracies also increases; institutional choices tend to favor the division of powers rather than concentration into a single body or party; and electoral rules are increasingly chosen to permit multiple parties to participate in and share government.

YOU CAN CLICK ON THE FIGURES TO ENLARGE THEIR SIZE

1. The number of countries increases

This is facilitated by open trade and communications, which make the economic advantages of large-scale states less relevant, while the costs of exclusion in their political decision making become more visible.

2. The number of democracies increases

There exist a positive correlation between the spread of democracy and the increase in the number of independent countries, which implies a decrease in their size. The number of democracies in countries with less than ten million inhabitants is twice the number of large
democracies. The rates of success in democratization are even higher for small communities within large federations. Decentralization and federalism, which give small nations and regions means of self-government, consolidate democracy.

3. Divided and multiparty governments proliferate

Democratic regimes tend to endure when they adopt institutional formulas favoring divided and multiparty governments rather than a concentration of power in a single political party. Out of sixty-four democratic regimes in countries with more than one million inhabitants, only one sixth are parliamentary regimes with majority electoral rules, while one third are parliamentary regimes with proportional representation, and one half are presidential or semi-presidential regimes.

4. Proportional representation expands

More specific institutional choices involve the rules for assembly elections. In a global perspective they have evolved from indirect elections to direct elections by majority rule and from these to mixed systems and proportional representation rules, thus steadily enlarging the potential basis for participating and power-sharing groups. More and more countries tend to adopt electoral systems with multi-seat districts and proportional representation rules.

As actors' self-interested behavior leads to broadly efficient and satisfactory institutional choices, it seems that a kind of 'invisible hand' in the field can be identified.

Paper:
‘The Invisible Hand in Institutional Design’
CLICK

The program and most papers presented in the conference can be accessed here:
CLICK

COMMENTS

Steven Hill said...

Josep, thanks, as always, for your insightful postings.

I noticed your listing of ‘The Design of Democratic Institutions’, organized by the Political Science and Political Economy (PSPE) Group of the London School of Economics. That is of great interest to me...

Thanks

Steven Hill,

New America Foundation

Washington, DC

Jorge Urdánoz said...

Dear Josep, I liked your last post – and, what is even better, it made me think. The combination of the increasing number of countries and the increasing number of democracies (especially combined with your last book’s thesis about “Empires”, although you don’t mention it specifically in this post) is a good approach to the current situation. I do not think Fukuyama was as wrong as usually is said with his thesis about the End of History…although certainly the title was excessively hyperbolic and his affirmations have been continuously misunderstood, of course…

JORGE
Columbia University
New York

Juan-Manuel Abal Medina said...

Querido Josep,

El articulo realmente excelente, felicitaciones

Abrazo

Juan
Buenos Aires

Nobel Taagepera

Great news!

Our colleague Rein Taagepera (University of California at Irvine and Tartu University, Estonia) has been awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science “for his profound analysis of the function of electoral systems in representative democracy”.

The Skytte Prize was commented in one of the first posts of this Blog (10 September 2006) as “the most significant attempt to create a worldwide prize in Political Science with similar prestige as the Nobel Prizes”.

Rein Taagepera has participated in at least six occasions in the discussions in this Blog. A brief summary of his comments can enlighten the reader about his analytical insights and the broad scope of his intellectual and other interests.

1) In the post ‘Academics Entering Politics’ (22 October 2006), I included Taagepera’s account of his running for President of Estonia in the first post-Soviet election in 1992 and his further part-time political activism there. Among other things he said to have learned from the experience that: “A scholar chooses the problems s/he wishes to work on; while problems choose the politician whether s/he wants to deal with them or not. However, a scholar doesn't take a position unless s/he is pretty certain; a politician has to take a stand even when s/he is less than 50 % certain of the option advocated.”

2) In the post ‘Estonian Political Laboratory’ (03 March 2007), written on the occasion of a parliamentary election there, I summarized Taagepera’s influence on the design of the electoral system and other institutional rules in the previous process of democratization.

3) The post ‘Freedom for Scotland’ (05 May 2007) finished with the statement that: “Small nations like Scotland are now viable and, at the same time, better fit than large, heterogeneous states for democratic self-government.”
Taagepera responded: “Of course. I very much agree that the national state no longer represents the optimal or actual unit on all dimensions --cultural, economic, military, etc. It always was a somewhat artificial pretension… Why should Scotland, Catalonia, Bavaria (who still had its own stamps less than 100 years ago), Corsica and Mezzogiorno be forced to deal with the European Union through some intermediary centers, if they should prefer direct access? This is not to say they MUST go separate. The decision should be up to them --and only them.”

4) On the post ‘Bringing the Empire Back In’ (02 June 2007), where Taageppera’s works on historical empires were cited, Taagepera said:
Yes, [Samuel] Finer's work [The History of Government from the Earliest Times] is "impressive, indispensable and irregular "-- inevitably the latter, given his death before he could tidy it up… Yet it would be a superb challenge to turn Finer into something more systematic, preferably with a quantitative backbone, for which he has bits and pieces.

5) The post ‘Brussels, Federal District' (16 September 2007) ended with the bet that “If Flanders and Wallonia stay ruling on their own, Brussels could just become the federal district of Europe, located as it is --somehow like Washington DC is in America-- at the meeting point between the North and the South of the Union.” To which Taagepera commented: “Yes, it's quite likely”.

6) Finally, in the post ‘Large Assemblies, Small Districts’ (13 January 2008), I extensively commented and drawn on Taagepera’s most recent book Predicting Party Sizes focusing on his formula relating the number of parties in parliament, P, with the average district number of seats, M, and the total number of seats in the assembly, S; in his notation:
P = (MS)1/4
This opened one of the most lively, long and interesting discussions in this Blog so far.

So thank you, Rein, for everything !!!

COMMENTS

Matthew Shugart said...

This is such a richly deserved honor for Rein.
San Diego, California

Rob Richie said...

Noble and Nobel indeed!
Thanks for this good news, Joseph, and big congratulations, Rein.

Rob
Fair Vote
Maryland

What to Talk About

In the ongoing American primaries, voters unmistakably declare that their main concerns are the economy and Iraq. But the three surviving candidates try to talk also on immigration, health care and the environment. There is an election in Spain this Sunday. Most people declare that their highest concerns are inflation, housing and terrorism. But the two main contenders try to focus on immigration and the unity of the motherhood. Politicians do not necessarily focus on the issues that worry the voters the most, but rather on those on which they can expect to have an electoral advantage. It is more important what they talk about than what they say.

With my colleague Humberto Llavador, we have built a model of electoral competition focusing on the selection of issues by parties and candidates –see the full paper below. Against standard ‘spatial’ models, we do not assume that parties or candidates compete to win an election by ‘moving’ their policy positions across the policy or ideology space and fighting for the ‘center’, but rather by shaping the space with choices of issues to which they try to give salience during the electoral campaign. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal on the issue as an alternative to the status-quo policy, as well as talking about it, usually with a value or argument, and making it news with some effort investment in order to making it relevant for voters’ electoral decisions. The new proposal does not need to be ‘centrist’ but rather the opposite, it must be significantly distant from the status-quo.

Of course, party leaders choose to give salience to an issue because they may think their policy position on the issue will be capable of gaining the favor of the majority of the public. Each party expects a higher probability of victory if its chosen issue becomes salient in the voters’ decision. But parties have to trade off the pre-campaign salience of each issue in voters’ concerns and the voters’ support or consensus in favor of the policy alternatives on the issue.

If one issue is highly salient in the voters’ concerns, but there is uncertainty about which possible policy proposals is better, choosing to campaign on the issue may be risky –as is probably the case, for example, with the housing crisis right now. If, on the contrary, there is broad social consensus about the best policy alternative to an unsatisfactory status-quo on one issue, but the issue is not a priority for voters’ electoral decision, running on that issue can attract little attention –as might be the case with the environment.

We have found that, although parties do not compete on irrelevant issues (those with both low salience among voters and doubtful or divisive policy proposals), indeed the issues which are considered the most important ones by a majority of votes may not be given salience during the electoral campaign. The equilibrium results depend only on the probability of victory of the best policy alternatives that parties can propose.

This may be a surprising result, but it may be a reasonable one after all. Even if there is extensive public concern on some issue, if there is not a single policy proposal on the issue which can attract broad consensus, focusing on that issue might produce division and polarization among both parties and voters. Important issues in people’s concerns can, thus, be solved through electoral competition only when a policy alternative appears as clearly superior to voters’ eyes. In the absence of a likely successful policy alternative, parties can choose not to give salience to the issue, thus maintaining the status-quo policy even if it is unsatisfactory for voters.

In the short term, mediocre policies broadly rejected by the electorate, as well as incumbent parties with bad performance in government, may survive for lack of a sufficiently convincing alternative –this is indeed likely to happen in some elections ahead. In the long term, broad policy consensus can be accumulated on an increasing number of issues, although not in the order of importance in voters’ concerns. After a long period of elections in a stable institutional and contextual setting, cumulative consensus may deprive parties from worrying issues and broadly appealing policy proposals. Then they may have to focus on relatively low relevant and divisive issues –such as abortion, for instance, just to mention one.

REFERENCE

Josep M. Colomer and Humberto Llavador, 'An Agenda-Setting Model of Electoral Competition', Working Paper, 2008.
CLICK

Electoral systems, Majority rule, Multiparty systems

The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is just published. It is presented, in nine volumes and 4,000 pages, as the second edition to replace the one published in 1968. According to its own introduction, "it covers scholarship and fields that have emerged and matured since the publication of the original international edition. Highlights the expanding influence of economics in social science research and features new articles and biographies contributed by scholars from around the world on a wide array of global topics in the social sciences."

Here are my articles on:

Electoral systems

Majority rule

Multiparty systems

To see them: CLICK

REFERENCE

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. William A. Darity, Jr., ed. 2^nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 4000 pp. 9 vols.

The Super Tuesday Game

This long American election year has just started but it is already raising high interest and passions, not only in America but worldwide. Three different approaches can be identified in the study of the U.S. presidential primary elections, but none seems good enough to make accurate predictions this year.

The first approach remarks that primary voters are typically more extreme or eccentric than the average voter in the general election, thus pulling candidates away from the center and generating higher polarization between the two final contenders than in the whole electorate. The first elections with generalized primaries in the Democratic party, with McGovern and Carter as winning candidates, seemed to give support to this view.

However, other authors remarked that the outcome of primary elections is, above all, unpredictable. According to social choice theory, the procedure would be ‘fundamentally flawed’ and vulnerable to the indirect influence of irrelevant candidacies. Surprise in early caucuses and elections, momentum, media attention, endogenous formation of preferences and the bandwagon effect would be characteristic elements of this kind of elections. Even the formal-model oriented book on the presidential election game by Steven Brams (which is now just reprinted) inconclusively concludes that ‘the strategy of ambiguity may be productive or unproductive’, ‘there is no set of policy positions… that is invulnerable`, and ‘primaries so often seem to yield topsy-turvy outcomes’.

Note that unpredictability means that sometimes the two major presidential candidates can be more polarized than the electorate, but sometimes they may not. Actually more recent emphasis has been put on the electability of the candidates. According to some empirical models, any candidate with national-poll support above 40 percent before the Iowa caucus is likely to win the party selection. In the so-called ‘invisible primary’, each party leadership, driven by strong electoral motives, would coordinate on a widely acceptable candidate and organize support through fund-raising and endorsements by state governors, influential media and interest group leaders, while primary voters would have also learned to elect the electable in the general election, not a more extreme candidate than the party supporters. This might be helped by more widely diffused and accessible information and communication, which make the primary season no longer a collection of separate local events but a big national debate (and international spectacle). According to this view, electability, rather than extremism or hazard, would have driven the choice of Republican candidates Reagan, Bush Sr., Dole and Bush Jr., as well as Democrats Mondale, Clinton, Gore and Kerry. A negative case would have been Dukakis in 1988, but this case would also support the model, since no candidate was sufficiently popular at the beginning of the process among Democrats that year. In fact, a majority around a candidate has been formed increasingly early in the process in successive elections.

Nevertheless, this year no model seems to help much. The crucial point is that it’s not clear who the most electable candidates in the general election are. One could say that now that we had learned how to use the machine, there is no fuel. On the Democrats’ side, Hillary Clinton overtly fears that a more-extreme-than-the-average candidate could win, only to confirm the traditional negative evaluation of the procedure. On the Republican side, no candidate had, by far, more than 40 percent national support before Iowa. The party leadership seems to hesitate and may have less control over the ‘invisible primary’ than in the past. Even if this year the electoral calendar is earlier than ever, majority support for a pair of candidates may emerge rather late.

REFERENCES

Steven Brams. The Presidential Election Game. Yale UP. New edition 2008 CLICK

The Forum. Special Issue: The Politics of Presidential Selection: 2008 CLICK

COMMENTS

Matthew Shugart said...

I don't see how the nomination of Carter supports the notion that primary electorates tend to be "more extreme." Carter didn't exactly represent the party's McGovern wing.

And, of course the argument for polarization seems to assume closed primaries and caucuses, yet most of the early contests in 2008 are open (at least to independents, and often to any voter).

On the other hand, the more open process should encourage the nomination of the more 'electable' candidate (on the presumption that the one that attracts independents and cross-party voters is indeed more electable in the general). Yet, fears by party regulars of meddling by "outsiders" may produce a polarizing backlash (see McCain vs. Bush, 2000; perhaps something similar is underway with Obama vs. Clinton).

No wonder no model helps much!

MSS
U. California, San Diego


Gilles Serra said...

Dear Josep, thanks for this very interesting entry.

I wanted to suggest a fourth feature of primaries, which is their ability to reveal information about relevant characteristics of the candidates. In particular, competition within a party is an effective way to test the candidates’ campaigning skills before they are nominated: primary candidates are forced to debate on Television, run advertisements, and they are thoroughly scrutinized by the media which allows party members to discriminate which of them would withstand a similar treatment during the general election.

Primaries can therefore uncover some appealing politicians who were previously underestimated or marginalized. A classic example is John F. Kennedy, who was relatively unknown in 1960, but whose victory in West Virginia’s primary revealed his ability to win protestant votes and convinced his party to grant him the nomination. Other examples of candidates whose surprising appeal to voters was unveiled thanks to a primary election are Ségolène Royale in France, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Felipe Calderón in Mexico. We could speculate that Barak Obama would not have been able to come forward as a credible candidate if he had not had the chance to prove his rallying capacity during the invisible primary.

Primaries can also reveal undesirable features of candidates, like potentially scandalous secrets or a propensity to make blunders (of the style of Howard Dean’s primal scream). The party obviously prefers those negative characteristics to be revealed during a primary where that candidate can be discarded, rather than the general election when it is too late to replace her.

You say, correctly from my point of view, that it is not yet clear who the more electable candidates are. One prediction of this fourth model of primaries is that such information needs more time to flow, with the primary season still having a long way to go. I think we can hang on to our seats for upcoming blunders, screams, tears, and exploding scandals that will leave only one man (or woman) standing in each party.

Oxford University, Nuffield College

Large Assemblies, Small Districts

Almost twenty years ago, Rein Taagepera and Matthew Shugart published an innovative book, Seats and Votes, which they dared to present as a potential ‘Rosetta Stone’ not only for electoral studies but for other branches of political science as well. Now Taagepera has published a book-form of his further work with still more provocative ambition and potential impact,
Predicting Party Sizes. In this and other works, the physicist-trained, political scientist turned Taagepera campaigns for both scientifically cumulative and practically applicable knowledge in politics, which, in his view, requires making relations between variables precise and quantifiable. He wants to “present scholarly results in a way practitioners of politics could use”.

To show the potential of Taagepera’s approach, let me just draw a little on what I think is his central finding: a formula relating the number of parties in parliament, P, with the average district number of seats, M, and the total number of seats in the assembly, S; in his notation:

P = (MS)^1/4

The title of Taagepera’s book might be a little misleading because it may suggest that the number of parties is always a dependent variable of the basic elements of the electoral systems –a statistical-regression approach that Taagepera characteristically scorns as too limited. Actually his formula accepts two-direction lines of causality. It can indeed be turned the other way around in order to present the electoral system as derived from the number of parties. Specifically:

M = P⁴/S

Since, according to Taagepera, the number of seats of the assembly depends strongly on the country’s population (in a cube root relation), we can deduct from the above formula that, for similar number of parties, P, the larger the country, and hence the larger the assembly, S, the smaller the expected district magnitude, M. Very large countries, precisely because they have large assemblies, should be associated to small (single-member) districts. The institutional designers in India, for example, are likely to choose single-member districts, while the institutional designers in Estonia are likely to choose multimember districts, typically associated to proportional representation rules. Thus we should usually see large assemblies with small districts, and small assemblies with large districts. Which is what we indeed usually see.

The interest of this finding is that it is counter-intuitive, since apparently small countries should have more ‘simple’ party configurations, so that they could work with simple electoral systems with single-member districts and majority rule in acceptable ways (actually this tends to happen in very small and micro-countries with only a few dozen thousand inhabitants in which only one or two significant parties emerge). But now we could have an answer to the very intriguing question of why large countries, including the United States, in spite of the fact that large size is typically associated to high heterogeneity, keep small single-member districts and have not adopted proportional representation. The answer may be that in large countries such as Australia, Canada, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, a large assembly can be sufficiently inclusive, even if it is elected in small, single-member districts, due to territorial variety of the representatives. By contrast, in small countries, including Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and so many others, the size of the assembly is small and, as a consequence, the development of multiple parties has favored more strongly the adoption of more inclusive, large multimember districts with proportional representation rules.

A relevant implication for political practitioners of institutional design is that if the size of the assembly is rather stable and depends on the country's size, for a small country with a small assembly just a few parties can be sufficient to produce a change of electoral system in favor of proportional representation. In contrast, for a large country and a large assembly, many parties would be necessary to produce such a result --as some of our colleagues in Britain, for instance, know very well.

REFERENCE:

Rein Taagepera, Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems, Oxford University Press, 2007. CLICK

COMMENTS

Jan-Erik Lane said...

I will check this model by looking at the UK, Sweden and Russia.
The problem with this approach is that social reality is not CONSTANT like the universe.
How can you be sure that
(1) P = (MS)^1/4
does not change to 1/3 or 1/5 in the future? But of course the speed of light c or strength of gravity G does not change!

jan

Rein Taagepera said...

Thanks for the publicity!

Yes, P = (MS)^1/4
is at the core of the model. An acquaintance dealing in ceramics offered to put one of my equations on a plaque, and I proposed precisely that one.

And yes, M=P⁴/S is as valid, and can be expected to be at work in constituent assemblies.
(Could it be tested?)
To avoid an impression of directionality, MS/P⁴=1 or P⁴/MS=1 might be the safest way to express it.

The range of P is roughly 2 to 10. Hence P⁴ ranges from about 16 to 10,000.
In comparison, S ranges from about 20 to 700 in present democracies.
Hence the impact of S on M is appreciably smaller than that of P.
Even for S=700, 10 parties in the constituent assembly would push toward M=10,000/700=14.
Even for S=20, 2 parties in the constituent assembly would push toward M=16/20=1.

At present, the strongest predictor for M=1, at any S, from St Kitts to India, is British heritage (cf. p. 45 in Predicting).
It may come about through imitation of Westminster and also through imitation of two-party system in the constituent assembly (or its equivalent).

Re Jan-Erik's question: “How can you be sure that 1/4 in P = (MS)^1/4 does not change to 1/3 or 1/5 in the future?”
The exponent 1/4 is not empirical but theoretically derived.
In this respect, it is more akin to the "2" in E=mc² than to the numerical value of c.

Greetings,

Rein

Jan-Erik Lane said...

If you take the root out of big numbers, then you arrive at small numbers for sure.
But can this fomula capture the difference between Norway and Poland, between France and Italy?
There is a GREAT variation in the number of parties WITHIN the PR family.

jan

Rein Taagepera said...

Dear Jan:

I am referring to Chapter 8 in my book.
Please note that:the relationship applies directly only to "simple" electoral systems -- those where all seats are allocated in districts, without thresholds, runoffs and other complications. Even so, it expresses only the average mean trend. Individual electoral systems may be off by a factor of 2 (= multiply or divide by 2), and individual election results are off by even more. Table 8.1 (which is in the attachment) shows that the law N-zero=(MS)^1/4 applies within 20 % to the mean outcomes of all simple within-district formulas. It doesn't apply to the non-simple Two Rounds nor to SNTV.

What is the use of a law that fits only to the means of simple systems, with a large random error range?
It is better than nothing, a first approximation upon which further factors can be grafted.
Recall that Galileo's law of falling bodies accounts very imperfectly for the path of a falling leaf.

Greetings,
Rein

Jan-Erik Lane said...

You can estimate the true functional form for this “invariance” if you plot the line through the data. What they need is information about:

1) number of parties (real or the effective number)

2) average size of constituencies

3) number of parlamentarians

That should not be too difficult to get hold of. For UK, we would have:

1) 5-6 parties

2) 1

3) 650

Taking the fourth root gets us to about 5-6. So the formula works.

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

Italy: Large Assembly, All Kinds of Districts. At this point, it would be quite interesting to know Colomer's and Taagepera's prediction on the features of the next (if any) Italian electoral law. Please, however, refrain from saying that Italy is, as usual, an outlier...

Gianfranco Pasquino

Rein Taagepera said...

I'm loosing track of what the current Italian electoral laws are.

Iff all seats are allocated within districts according to a simple PR of FPTP rule (no thresholds, no second rounds, no parties within party blocs...), give me assembly size and distribution of district magnitudes, and I'll make a prediction for number of seat-winning parties and their size distribution.

If and only if...
Rein

Gianfranco Pasquino said...

House of Deputies: 630 seats; 27 districts (Puglia 44 seats; Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy 2, each 43 seats; Lombardy 1, 40 seats, Tuscany 38... Electoral sytem PR with majority bonus.

Gianfranco Pasquino

Rein Taagepera said...

Thanks.

On the basis of this information, the best quantitative guess would be based on
average M = 630/27 = 23.3; hence MS = 14,700.

It assumes that all seats are distributed in districts, with no thresholds, and parties do not form alliances.
Estimated likely error range (plus or minus) is indicated as +.

No. of seat-winning parties: N-zero = (MS)^1/4 = 11 + 3
Effective no. of parties: N-two = (MS)^1/6 = 4.9 + 2
Minimum measure of no. of p.: N-infinity = (MS)^1/8 = 3.3 + 1
meaning largest seat share s₁ = 1/N-infinity 0.30 + 0.05

Qualitative adjustments:
The many double-the-average districts make it slightly easier for small parties, enhancing N-zero.
Majority bonus reduces all N and enhances s₁; it depends on how strong this bonus is.

I have not looked up the actual results for Italy 2006 --let someone else do it.

Rein

Josep M. Colomer said...

The actual number of parliamentary parties in Italy changes constantly due to splits and migrations. But currently there are 12 parties, basically corresponding to electoral candidacies, plus a small 'mixed' group of independents. Taagepera predicts 11 + 3.

And there may be anticipated elections very soon!

Matthew Shugart said...

Josep, this is very interesting. I wonder about the following, however, from your post:

"in large countries such as Australia, Canada, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, a large assembly can be sufficiently inclusive, even if it is elected in small, single-member districts, due to territorial variety of the representatives."

I wonder because that list of countries includes two with significantly under-sized assemblies, according to the cube root (India and the USA). The UK, on the other hand, has one of the world's most "over-sized" lower houses.

So, I can see where the argument works well for the UK: Many more districts than would be the case for an assembly closer to the cube root, and hence a lot of "territorial variety of the representatives" (e.g. Scottish and Welsh nationalists, as well as LibDems). India has a high territorial variation, despite a "small" assembly, due to numerous state-based parties (most of which aggregate into one of two pre-electoral blocs).

The USA, on the other hand, has a lot less room to represent territorial variety, because the districts are so big in population terms due to the small assembly (for the country's population), and because its party system is much too small (just two parties would not be predicted even with the small assembly, according to Rein's models).

Josep M. Colomer said...

Matthew, Thanks a lot for your comment.

I think the point is about absolute size of the assembly, which permits variety of representatives, even if it's small relatively to other variables (country size...). The so-called two parties in the USA are really very varied --these days, with the primaries going on it's crystal clear: the variety of presidential candidates, as well as of representatives and senators, is as great as in most countries in Europe with multiple parties. This may make many people in the U.S. feel proportional representation is not necessary because many different tastes are already represented.

Matthew Shugart said...

As for variety, of course the only kind of variety that can be represented with SSDs [single-seat districts] is that which is regionally concentrated and even then, they are not accountable to any sympathetic voters outside their districts. There is systematic bias against those that are not even able to win a district plurality (which is almost always majority in the US, unlike all other relatively large FPTP countries), and still greater bias against them the more the number of seats is small. So, I agree that the argument you are making "works" on absolute size of the assembly, but the greater the geographic and population extent of SSDs, the less likely minorities are to find a regional concentration sufficient to win a seat. So, the argument you are making must also depend on the size of the assembly relative to total national population.

Thanks for the exchange!

--m

Rein Taagepera said...

S = P^1/3 [S: Size of the assembly; P: Population] visibly accounts for most of variation in S empirically --and even offers a logical process to explain it. Other factors should stand out as one considers the residue r = S/P^1/3, after the effect of S is taken out ("controlled for"). Better use log r, because it can be expected to be symmetrically distributed around 0, if there are no other factors except for random scatter. Actually, it shows a tail, which is largely corrected for by introducing literate adult population.

In short, play around with log r. As long as you stick to S, the huge effect of P keeps confusing you.

Rein

Institutional Design

My contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Comparative Politics:

Institutional design is the choice of rules for collective decision-making. At the moment of designing institutions, two main questions have to be addressed: who can be entitled to participate, and how decisions can be made. The first question points out to the design of the community. Collective decisions can be enforceable if people within some boundaries think or accept they share enough with the others to abide by the outcomes, even if they find themselves to be losers or in minority on some issues, or if the costs of not complying are too high. The West European model of nation-state building has been too often taken as the only reference and interesting path for building a political community. Political science is still very state-centered. However, recent and current developments, in both Europe and the rest of the world, demand for a more diversified menu, as we will discuss in the following pages. The second question –how decisions are made—implies at least to major issues: what can be decided on each occasion, which refers to how decision powers are divided among different bodies or branches of government, and how people’s preferences are transformed into collective outcomes, which basically involves choices on voting and electoral rules.

Many years ago, David Hume advised institutional designers with these words:

‘In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, but private interest. By this interest we must govern him and, by means of it, make him cooperate to public good, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition.’ (Hume 1741).

In this chapter we will prove that the assumption that people seek their own interest not only at making private or public policy decisions, but also at choosing the institutional rules for making those decisions, is broadly shared and analytically fruitful. Institutional designers, while tend to deploy their ‘ambition’, they often aim at putting levers of rule at their easy disposal in order to concentrate, rather than check power. However, an efficient institutional design –that is, one making rulers “cooperate to public good”, in Hume’s terms-- can result from circumstances in which no actor has sufficient influence to impose its own project and diverse ambitions counterweight each other. Not surprisingly, this is a relatively frequent situation in a complex world, which may explain why major institutional choices are increasingly made in favour of formulas able to produce power-sharing and to satisfy broad groups of people, which is just another way to refer to ‘public good’.

The following review shows that, in the current world, the number of small, sufficiently homogeneous communities to make consensual and enforceable collective decisions increases; the number of democracies also increases; institutional choices tend to favour division of powers rather than concentration on a single body or party; and electoral rules are increasingly chosen to permit multiple parties to participate and share government. Institutional choices during the last decades tend to produce small countries, more democracies, division of powers, and electoral rules favoring multiparty representation. As actors’ self-interested behaviour leads to broadly efficient and satisfactory institutional choices, it seems that a kind of ‘invisible hand’ in the field can be identified –actually in a not very dissimilar way as a pattern of unintended consequences for private decisions was also identified by Adam Smith, in truth David Hume’s favourite disciple.

The chapter is divided in two parts. In the first, the problems of building a community are addressed with the help of the categories of ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘empire’. In the second part, we review the state of the art regarding the choice of institutional rules for division of powers and elections. A few remarks conclude.

See the full article: CLICK

This Blog is being censored in mainland China. Internet users cannot access to this Blog. This fact may illustrate some features of the current Chinese government and politics which are being discussed here during the last few weeks.

One Country, Three Systems

About twenty years ago the Communist government of China (officially People’s Republic of China) offered the Nationalist rulers in Taiwan (officially Republic of China) a formula for reunification similar to the one arranged for the handover of Hong Kong, which was labelled by Deng Xiaoping “one country, two systems”. However, during the last period Taiwan has liberalized and democratized and now it is much ahead of the institutional formulas which are really implemented in Hong Kong. The Hongkongers might prefer, in fact, to enjoy constitutional rules similar to those in Taiwan.

Ten years ago Hong Kong ceased being a British colony and became a “special administrative region” of China. The Chinese communists accepted that for 50 years, that is, until 2047, they would facilitate the development of the capitalist economy in Hong Kong (which is actually what they are trying to do in mainland China too) and would give Hongkongers broad political autonomy except in defence and foreign affairs. In reality Hong Kong looks much as a different country, having not only an outstanding economic and urban development, but its own passport, borders control, currency and co-official languages (Cantonese, more different from Mandarin than one could expect, and English, less popular than one could expect), while it is being submitted to close political control by the rulers in Beijing.

There were virtually free elections in Hong Kong in 1995, just two years before the British handover, for the first time in 150 years of colonial rule. But the invention was quickly dismantled by the Chinese government when it took over. Now Beijing maintains in Hong Kong a framework similar to the previous colonial experience. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong has formally wide powers analogous to those of the former colonial Governor. He is chosen every five years by an Election Committee formed of 800 members, mostly elected or appointed by business, professional, social and religious groups whose total number of voters encompasses about 5% of what would be universal suffrage. The Chief Executive is accountable and must report regularly to Beijing. Besides this, the Legislative Council is formed of 60 members, of whom 30 are indirectly chosen in “functional” constituencies of corporatist profile and limited franchise and 30 are elected in territorial constituencies. The pro-democracy parties usually collect about 60% of popular votes in the latter elections, but they find themselves in minority in the Council in front to the mostly pro-Beijing “functional” delegates.

Roughly speaking, during the last ten years Hongkongers have replaced the British colonial administration with the Chinese one. But the Basic Law of Hong Kong which was agreed by the British and the Chinese governments establishes that the “ultimate aim” of the system is to introduce universal suffrage elections. A few months ago the current Chief Executive released a ‘Green Paper on Constitutional Development’ proposing cosmetic changes, while pro-democracy legislators managed to agree on a plan to abolish the ‘functional’ constituencies by 2012 and elect all seats by a mixed system of proportional representation and plurality rule. In the midst of some open discussion, pro-Beijing officers are suggesting, however, that universal suffrage elections for the Chief Executive should be postponed to 2017 or perhaps 2022 and for the Legislative Council to 2020.

Meanwhile the political process in Taiwan has accelerated. For a long period the nationalist Kuomintang party maintained in the island an authoritarian regime, artfully supported by the fiction that most members of the Assembly represented mainland China –actually the same people who had been elected in 1947 remained in their seats for more than 40 years without re-election. They, however, eventually resigned, and the system was open to multiparty competition. In 2000 there was alternation in government and the first non-Kuomintang president was democratically elected.

The paradox is now this. In the coming year 2008, there will be democratic elections in Taiwan with high rivalry between candidates still pro-Chinese reunification and others pro-independence. A few months later in the year there will be nondemocratic legislative elections in Hong Kong too, with pro-Beijing and pro-democracy candidates running. For the Taiwanese, the existence of “two systems” is leading to “two countries”, while for the Hongkongers two actual countries are submitted to one system. Deng Xiaoping’s original formula has been dismissed on both fronts.

REFERENCES

Lam Waiman, Percy Luentim, Wilson Wong and Ian Holliday eds. Contemporary Hong Kong Politics: Governance in the Post-1997 Era. Hong Kong University Press, 2007.

‘The First Ten Years of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’, special issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 29, 1, 2007.

Carine Lai and Christine Loh, From Nowhere to Nowhere: A Review of Constitutional Development. -Hong Kong 1997-2007. HK: Civic Exchange, 2007.

Green Paper on Constitutional Development, 2007: CLICK.

François Briatte said...

Hello Josep,

My blog is not blocked in China (or at least I believe so, but have not found a proper test to confirm it).

I have assembled three of your texts into a single PDF file, downloadable from this blog, which brings weekly news to French political scientists about their profession and its research agenda:

CLICK

My next step will be to host the file on my personal blog, phnk.com.
Both blogs should be allowed in China, although I suspect that they will not stay allowed for very long. I will keep you informed of any development.

Best regards,
François

http://sciencepolitique.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/sur-le-regime-politique-chinois/

Science politique en ligne

Sur le régime politique chinois

9 décembre 2007

Cette recension vient en soutien à Josep Colomer, dont l’excellent blog vient d’être censuré par les autorités chinoises. Le fichier qui suit est un copié-collé de trois de ses textes récents [1,2,3], réalisé avec son accord, et diffusé via ce blog afin de contourner l’interdiction chinoise. Les textes concernent la nature du régime politique chinois et ses changements concevables.Télécharger : colomer.pdf [13 pages] Cette recension est peu de choses – l’hébergeur de ce blog a déjà eu maille avec les autorités chinoises, et la diffusion du fichier en Chine restera limitée en toutes circonstances. Cette recension nous éloigne aussi de la science politique française. Mais je tenais à faire passer l’idée, en creux, qu’il manque une démarche revendicative et internationaliste au sein de la discipline.

The Chinese Empire Could Burst

The unavoidable comment in China is that political liberalization might threaten the unity of such a huge country. The empire could burst (‘éclater’, in a comparable manner as had been predicted by Carrère d’Encausse for the Soviet Union).

As a very old empire, China has indeed expanded and contracted over the territory with no a priori fixed boundaries. Still during the 20th century the boundaries of China have been redrawn a few times, in particular after the formation of a new republic of Mongolia in 1911, the separation of Taiwan after 1949, the annexation of Tibet in 1951, and the handover of Hong Kong and Macau in 1997 and 1999. In China the appearance of some high degree of ethnic homogeneity may be only the perception of the ignorant external observer, since relevant religious, race and language differences exist among its inhabitants. Although about half of the population officially reports no organized religious affiliation, apparently hundreds of millions practice folk religious traditions and have informal ties to local temples and house churches. While Han Chinese makes up the vast majority of the population, its distribution is highly uneven with large parts of western China having Han Chinese as a minority. The common written language acts as the standard used by an actual minority of the population over a continuum of spoken languages and dialects –apparently with differences as notable as those between, say, different Latin-derived languages in Europe, which may make people from different places unable to understand each other.

So far, villages are the only level of the institutional structure that has been open to people’s direct elections. Village committee elections were introduced to curtail growing unrest in rural China after the communist system of ‘production brigades’ was abolished. The new village committees, each formed by three to seven members, oversee most of the daily affairs of the village people. According to official estimates, about 600 million people may have participated in direct village elections at least once since 1999. These elections imply direct nomination of candidates, more candidates than seats to be filled, secret ballot, several ballot procedures of voting for individuals, and majority rule. It should be noted, however, that the average number of inhabitants in a village is below one thousand people, so making these elections a local affair with no visible impact on the general party’s and institutional structure. Certain analyses pretend that village elections may mark the beginning of a process of democratization from below. But in order to do so, the crucial step would be the implementation of elections at the township level and above, on which there have been only a few experiments and much resistance.

The strategic decision of democratizing a complex multilevel structure, either ‘from below’ or ‘from above’ may have important consequences on the outcome of the whole process. This issue has been widely neglected in the literature on democratization. But, as it was addressed some time ago by Juan Linz and Al Stepan, “the sequence of elections, per se, can help construct or dissolve identities… [because] elections, especially ‘founding elections’, help create agendas, actors, organizations, and most importantly, legitimacy and power”.

Specifically, if during a process of liberalization or democratization, the first elections are local or regional, as happened in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there are strong incentives for people participating to focus on local, regional and ethnic issues, organize local, regional and ethnic parties, and as a result weakening the legitimacy of the union. This effect can be stronger if the general design in the center does not include unambiguous democratization, but only some degree of liberalization, since this can give more open regional and local elections and the subsequent representative structures higher levels of legitimacy. In contrast, if all-union elections are held first, there are strong incentives to create all-union parties and an all-union agenda enabling the elected representatives to make binding decisions about the future of the union. Precisely because China is a so vast ‘empire’ with significant economic and territorial inequalities and high levels of ethnic pluralism, democratizing the ‘center’, that is, the all-China institutions, may be a priority to keep the union up.

REFERENCES

Diamond, Larry, and Ramon H. Myers. 2000. ‘Elections and Democracy in Greater China’, special issue of The China Quarterly; particularly the articles by Kevin J. O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, and by Robert A. Pastor and Quinshan Tan.

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1992. ‘Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia’, Daedalus, 121, 2, 123-139

COMMENTS

Rein Taagepera said...

Rearranging the order of elections could not have preserved the Soviet Union any more than Spain. It lacked the essential cultural glue.

Portuguese still is the prestige language in Angola (not to mention French in Morocco), but Russian lacks any cultural prestige in Estonia.

This degree of imperial failure is quite remarkable.

How is it in Tibet or Siankiang? -- I have no idea.

Rein
Irvine, California, and Tartu, Estonia

Josep Colomer said…

The official version is that people from Sinkiang and from Shanghai, if they ever met, they would understand each other. But I read a few books on Chinese language (fascinating subject!) and I doubt so very much. At least Cantonese in Hong Kong is completely unintelligible for Mandarin-speakers and viceversa.

Rein Taagepera said…

It depends on whom one counts as "people". Native Uighurs, if they know only their own (Turkic) language,would not understand a word from a Shanghai person. But the central coast (Shanghai) version of Han is the likely lingua franca of Han colonists who have immigrated to Siankiang from all corners of China. Those Uighurs who have mastered some Chinese probably would also have been taught that version. It's a far cry from mutual non-understanding between Cantonese and Pekinguese, where the differences are age-old. So the east-west dimension rather than the north-south dimension would be chosen as an apparently neutral example by those who stress uniformity, but they do so at the cost of counting only Han speakers as "people". I wonder if those Han colonists in Siankiang order Uighur speakers to "speak a human language" when interacting with them, the way Russian colonists did in Soviet Estonia.

Salvador Giner said...

It will burst!

I predicted in 1982, that the Russian system would break down, and precisely how it would. (La Vanguardia, 4 December 1982).

Jan-Erik Lane said...

Like Max Weber, you underestimate the role of naked power.

Perhaps it could be of interest to other scholars to realise that Weber left out naked power when theorizing political regimes. The most employed macro model in political science is still Max Weber’s theory of legitimate authority or domination, which all undergraduate students all over the world are being told. Scoring high on conceptual parsimony and empirical richness, it merely uses a couple of ideal-types to cover the historical variation in rulerships, from Ancient times to the early 20^th century when presidential and parliamentary democracy was becoming the most relevant choice of a regime. Weber wrote down his theory twice, one shorter version and one longer version – both published in his posthumous Economy and Society (1978). The incredible coverage of empirical details does hide the implicit model, which is true of any text by Weber, attempting to reconcile the historical method with the new tools of sociology.

Now, Weber claims as his basic assumption that naked power cannot last. When a government uses merely the tools of repression, then it is bound to disintegrate and the rime will go down under. The cement between rulers and the ruled is the belief in legitimacy –a special value orientation that confers moral acceptance upon the government from the population. And we all know that Weber identified three types of legitimacy: legal-rational or modern, charismatic or revolutionary, and traditional or customary.

Yet, naked power is more than a mere category to collect a few border line cases or outliers. Naked power can accomplish tremendous results, as with 20^th century totalitarianism, not withstanding all the horrors involved in The Final Solution, the Gulag camps, the Cultural Revolution and bizarre North Korea. Naked power works to some extent in several Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, although carefully hidden behind Wahabism. Saddam Hussein, using somewhat unsuccessfully first Arab nationalism and later on Sunni tradition, could not be brought down except by military intervention. And Iran will not change, perhaps in hundred years, as Shi’ism together with naked power will prove irresistible. When naked power is employed, the outcome may be derisory, as in Latin America and Africa, when military regimes have proved incompetent. But that does not entail that all forms of naked power is inefficient. Far from it. Authoritarianism in China may prove long lasting, especially when combined with stunning economic advances. The present Chinese regime will not hesitate to use a clever employment of the tools of repression, when confronted by a crisis. Naked power is not ridiculous, but offers a basis of regime duration. And it can be brought to high levels of efficiency employing more and refined methods of intimidation and repression.

Naked power does not employ religion or ethnicity as the rationalisation of its domination. It just neutralises or eliminates whatever opposition comes its way.

Jan-Erik Lane

University of Geneva
University of South Pacific

Can China Become Democratic?

I have participated in a three-day international workshop in Shanghai Jiaotong University focusing on the prospects for democracy in China. Let me say, first of all, that the visitor's impression regarding the current process of urban and economic growth and development in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing is even more impressive than what one can expect from reading and looking at pictures. The success of the economic course launched by Deng Xiao Ping since 1978, and especially during the last fifteen years or so, is out of question. How such a radical turn has been accepted by so many millions of people without major political resistance tells much about the disaster of the previous period and especially the destruction generated by Mao's 'cultural revolution'€™. However, the prospects for the current economic process to lead to significant political liberalization and democratization look grim.

Our Chinese colleagues basically transmit, with some twists and elaboration, the official message: China can become democratic only after a long period of economic growth which is still in an early period. Deng had said that there would be national elections after fifty years of development, so about 2037, while the most optimistic academics would bet now for about 2020. The echoes of the traditional political sociology on the 'preconditions'€™ for democracy are obvious. Actually this outlook is usually presented under the vest of political '€˜modernization'€™, which implies that economic growth produces increasing social complexity and an educated middle class which, sooner or later, require political pluralism and accommodation. In China, while the benefits of foreign investments and the expansion of mass consumption were nearly-universal in the first years of economic opening, they are now increasingly mixed with broadening inequalities, continuous migrations from the countryside to the cities and underlying distress. What Przeworski labels 'redistributive fights€' could indeed spread during the next few years. However, as recently noted by Bueno de Mesquita and George Downs, in China as in other countries we also observe the "€œominous and poorly appreciated fact that economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes"€ (CLICK). In the typical exchange under an authoritarian regime, the subjects can renounce to choose or control the rulers in return for some favourable economic policy. In China a crucial element of the rulers’ hold of power is, of course, the warning lesson implied by the Tiananmen Square slaughter in 1989 --€“an episode which has become a kind of taboo and whose sole mention makes educated Chinese of these days very embarrassed.

The authorized discourse points to the internal evolution of the Communist Party as a promising march. A few years ago the party was defined no longer as of workers and peasants, but of "€œthree represents"€, including intellectuals and entrepreneurs. Yet some people say that rather than entrepreneurs joining the party it's party members who become entrepreneurs and get rich --a "€œglorious" achievement, in Deng's doctrine. A crucial issue in all dictatorships is the leader's succession. The Chinese have established some non-written rules to rotate the party leader every ten years, that is, every two party congresses, as they did successfully with the appointment of Jiang Zenin in 1992 and the current leader Hu Jintao in 2002. However, in the party congress held a few weeks ago there was no agreement on the future leader to take office in five years from now and two candidates seems to have been placed in potential rivalry. I was amazed by several positive references during our workshop to the example of the Mexican PRI, a former revolutionary, neatly authoritarian party which, relying upon some degree of economic success, was able to proceed to consecutive orderly successions of the leaders in power during several decades. The so-called 'limited pluralism' within the Chinese party is, in any case, extremely limited. Official data shows that in the previous party congress five years ago there were 6 percent more candidates to the Central Committee than seats to be filled, while this time there were 8.3 percent more. At this rhythm, the prospects for having two candidates per seat would definitely be placed in about thirty years from now.

An alternative hypothesis for a major political change should be based not on modernizing and liberalizing pressures derived from economic success but on failure. Some insiders predicted a few years ago "€œthe coming collapse of China"€, which was expected precisely for 2007 as a consequence, among other factors, of China's new membership to the World Trade Organization and the subsequent external competition, business failures and social unrest. Most authoritarian regimes fall because they fail, not because they succeed, and then a democratic regime can be established by default even if the maturity of civil society and the diffusion of democratic values are meagre. This is what more or less happened in several Asian '€˜tigers'€™ in the 1990s, including South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia, which turned to be, to be put in typical Maoist jargon, '€˜paper tigers'. The Chinese regime is also vulnerable, especially because, as one Chinese colleague remarked, the 'party-state'€™ is becoming a 'state-party'€™. Corruption is widespread and rather than greasing the wheels of business it might have a negative impact on growth. External shocks on energy or commerce are certainly possible. But against the implications of modernization theory, as far as considerable rates of economic growth will be maintained, I am afraid that what communist rulers and academics call "€œpeople's democratic dictatorship"€ will keep flourishing in China.

COMMENTS

Ronald J. Hill said...

"Most authoritarian regimes fall because they fail, not because they succeed"

A variant on this would say that the Soviet regime, as an example, was a victim of its own success: it succeeded in generating the kind of society that could no longer be governed effectively by the methods used to promote the initial development.

Convinced by this success that the methods of rule were valid, the regime refused to adapt to cope with the complex society that it had brought into being. Its failure was a failure even to act on the logic of its own ideology, which posited that change in the economic base leads to change in the superstructure (the political system).

In refusing to countenance adaptation of the political system to cope with a complex economy and society, it was rejecting both Marxist theory and Western political sociology of the 1960s.

The Chinese, by contrast, appear to have solved that problem by relinquishing political power over the economy, which now relies on the market for direction, not on instructions from the state.

But the logic of both Marxist theory and political sociology remains - and to it should be added the experience of hundreds of thousands of Chinese who have experienced life in different societies and political systems (and even studied Western social science). The lesson of 1911 (and of imported ideas in other historical contexts) is that authoritarianism may be unable to survive indefinitely when there are competing values. 'Comrade Transistor' deprived authoritarian regimes of control over the circulation of ideas, and 'Comrade Internet' is potentially even more powerful.

Unless we believe that ideas and experiences count for nothing in politics, change is surely inevitable.

Trinity College, Dublin

Jack said...

This is a fascinating post. I'm surprised you can have a panel discussion like that in China. Then again, I've never been there.

I suspect China is more likely to see flagging economic growth than democratization in the medium term. The argument that China needs more "development" before it can become democratic is not a stupid one. The problem is one of thresholds; when is China developed enough? Who decides?

How Many We Are

The number of academic researchers in political science across the world is much higher than twenty years ago. In total we may be already as many as economists, and more than sociologists. The numbers of students and graduates in political science and public policy are certainly still lower than those in economics and business, but the tendency of scholars to expand points out to a reduction of the gap.

Specifically, the combined official membership of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and the International Political Science Association (IPSA) is close to 25,000 individuals. This number is very similar to the combined membership of the American, European and International Economic Associations, and significantly higher than that for the corresponding associations in Sociology, which is about 17,000. The number of economists and of sociologists in academic associations rose at high speed in the 1950s and 1960s, but that of economists has been virtually stable since the early 1970s and the one of sociologists has possibly decreased, while the increase in the number of political scientists during the last few decades has been more spectacular.

Political science is still a very American discipline, but a little less than some years ago. The numbers are the following. The APSA membership is over 15,000 individuals. Of those, about 13,000 are in the United States, while about 600 are in Canada, 1,000 in Europe and 500 in the rest of the world. The ECPR estimates that the individuals working in its institution-members are about 7,000. But one can suspect that not all the employees in the 314 institutions in the consortium would likely become ECPR individual members if this were the only way to affiliate (like in APSA), so a more comparable estimate might be around 5,000. Of this, about 4,000 are in Europe, while about 500 in the United States, 200 in Canada and 300 in the rest of the world. The IPSA declares 1,500 individual members and 100 institution members, possibly about 3,000 individuals in total, a substantial fraction of which are in Asia and Latin America. About twenty years ago, an Oxford fellow presented the educated guess that “in the United States there is, by far, the largest proportion of all instructors in political science in the world, perhaps beyond 80 per cent” (Johnson, 1989). According to the above numbers, nowadays that proportion may be closer to 70 per cent.

The same numbers suggest that there can be about 1,700 transatlantic political science scholars: that is, about 1,000 Europeans being members of APSA and about 500 Americans and 200 Canadians travelling, at least occasionally, the other way around to ECPR meetings. In proportion, thus, Europeans pay more attention to American political science than the reciprocal, but the number of North Americans looking to Europe has increased considerably.

As a reference to compare, academic economists are much more heavily concentrated in their American association, which has almost 22,000 members, but only about 14,000 of these are in the United States. In total, still a narrow majority of all academic economists in the world are in American universities. Comparable numbers for sociologists do not seem available, but it’s positive that most academics in sociology in the world are outside the United States.

References

By searching appropriately, data can be found in the following well-known sites and their links (click): APSA ECPR IPSA
and the other associations mentioned.

Nevil Johnson, The Limits of Political Science (Oxford University Press, 1989).
I use this book only for data, although it was a kind of pronouncement against a science of politics; as the book review in the APSR said, this book “is so eminently wrong-headed yet has some interesting things to say about some disciplinary fads and foibles”.

COMMENT

Joaquim Silvestre said...

In a logical reaction from an economist, Joaquim Silvestre has compared prices, in order to know the proportions of professionals in each discipline who are members of the respective association, since the fee can be a factor of the decision. He has found that the APSA is quite more expensive than the AEA!
The figures below.

American Political Science Association
Regular Members with income $100,000+ $208
$80 - 99,999 $173
$60 - 79,999 $160
$50 - 59,999 $148
$40 - 49,999 $126
Under $40,000 $84

American Economic Association
Annual Income Membership Fees for 2007
Above $62,000 $90
$47,000 to $62,000 $77
$47,000 or less $64

J.S.
California, Davis

(For the editor of this blog, this might mean that there should be an even higher proportion of professionals in political science than economists than what the association memberships reveal, which sounds intriguing).

Brussels, Federal District

It’s more than one hundred days now that there was a general election in Belgium, but there is no government or prospects that one can be formed soon. The negotiations between the leading Flemish Conservative party and its Walloon counterparts failed. Meanwhile, the governments of Flanders and of Wallonia run on their own, business as usual. Perhaps, after all, this might be the most peaceful way to disband a state: by just dissolving the government and not forming a new one.

Actually, as an investment in peace, the state of Belgium is redeemed. Belgium was created, in the 1830s, as a wall between France and Germany, in the middle of the main axis of polarization and war in Europe. Napoleon had been defeated just at the surroundings of Brussels (in Waterloo). Belgium was formed soon afterwards as a state in perpetual neutrality. But also the Franco-Prussian war and the two World Wars were largely fought on Belgian soil. Logically, the Belgian state was persistently ahead in the attempts to build large areas of free trade and peaceful cooperation. After achieving the pioneer Benelux agreement with its neighbors, it was one of the founding members of the European communities, which led to the current European Union. Nowadays, a united and peaceful Europe has become a success helped in part by the traditional neutral and conveying role of the Belgian state. But precisely for this, to maintain Belgium as a unity may be less indispensable than ever before.

Whilst Belgium was opening outside, there was increasing rivalry and polarization inside. The likely split of Belgium is a neat example of the difficulties for a federal state to endure if it is formed with only two units. If only two territorial groups exist within a federation, polarization may develop on some divisive issue. Generally, if one of the territories is sufficiently large and sufficiently domineering, it may be able to try to impose its exclusive rule. The ambition to dominate may lead the larger group to the absorption in a unified structure of the weaker groups, while the latter may try secession (as happened, for instance, in the Serbia-dominated Yugoslavia). If the two groups have similar size, as in the Belgian case, a particularly unstable and conflictive relationship can develop. Each group can expect to be able to form a political majority and rule over the other, or to share power in an advantageous position, which may foster rivalry for domination. There are indeed many cases of only two-unit federations that split up (including, for instance, the Czechs and the Slovaks most recently). In contrast, more stable federal republics have high numbers of units, each of them sufficiently small in relative terms that none can reasonably feed ambitions of becoming dominant. Cases include, of course, Germany (with 16 units) and Switzerland (with 26), as well as the United States (with 50). The very European Union is also an increasingly self-assertive federal-like union, with 27 members now.

In Belgium, a traditional French-speaking and relatively wealthy Walloon majority began to be replaced, about forty years ago, with a new Dutch-speaking and newly prosperous majority, thus modifying each group’s expectations and relative positions as ruler and challenger. As a consequence of this rivalry, the Belgian state has been increasingly decentralized. Some balance between the two basic units was maintained on the basis of organizing Brussels as the third region in between. Brussels –French-speaking and Flemish-surrounded-- has been a wall within a wall . But the intermediate and balancing role of Brussels within Belgium is nowadays weakened as the two other regions decamp. The city, in contrast, is highly profiled in the international scene, as is the flamboyant capital of the European Union and the headquarters of many other European organizations, as well as of NATO. If Flanders and Wallonia stay ruling on their own, Brussels could just become the federal district of Europe, located as it is --somehow like Washington DC is in America-- at the meeting point between the North and the South of the Union.

REFERENCE

You may want see my book on the matter:

Large Empires, Small Nations.
The Uncertain Future of the Sovereign State CLICK

Just published!

COMMENT

Rein Taagepera said...

Yes, it's quite likely.

Rein,
returning to Irvine on 21 Sept.

Pieterjan said...

Dear Sir,

I tend to disagree with your appreciation of the present Belgian crisis for several reasons.
1) to present the role of the Brussels Region as a ‘intermediate and balancing role’ in the Flemish/Walloon rivalry – as I understood from your text – is, in my opinion, an overstatement. In my perception of everyday politics, Brussels Region has only a mild and limited influence on the rivalry, since its jurisdiction does not include volatile issues. Besides, both the Flemish and the Francophone Community remain responsible for the personal/individual matters of the(ir) inhabitants of the Region (which resulted in several conflicts over the years and lead to a closer cooperation/coordination as a result);
2) to portray Brussels as a ‘French-speaking and Flemish-surrounded’ region may be the dream of both Francophone and Flemish nationalists but hardly a reality. Recent research shows that just about half of the people living in Brussels are unilingual French. English and Arab are fast catching up with French. Flemish/Dutch stays a minority but official language. Brussels is Flemish-surrounded in theory, but not in practice: one of the basic reasons for the present political ‘crisis’ is precisely that the Francophone parties don’t want to split Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde as a constituency (as required by the constitution) because it would cost them a lot of votes from Francophones living in the ‘Flemish’ cities.

3) who would have the sovereignty over Brussels D.C.? Whilst Washington D.C. has a special status in the USA, it remains part of the American state. Brussels is important both for Belgium and the two regions alike (for Flanders because it is the administrative and political center of the Flemish government: for Wallonia because a lot of inhabitants are part of the French Community and are looking towards the South). An agreement on Brussels would even be, in my opinion, more difficult than an agreement on the future of Belgium (e.g. about 300.000 Flemish people work in Brussels; their income taxes now go to the federal government. Where would these taxes go if independent Flanders and Wallonia would administer Brussels together?). Besides, Brussels as a (European) federal district would have the symbolic connotation of the coming into being of a ‘United States of Europe’ or differently put: a truly federal Europe.

The good thing about the present crisis is that separation/independence (and more specifically: the practical realities of it) are discussed in mainstream media. The abstract idea of ‘Flemish independence’ – as put forward by Flemish nationalists – is made concrete: the economic cost (division of debt, division of real estate and moveable goods, the losses for the industry, …) and gains are all discussed in popular media (and presumably at the kitchen table or in the pub). Again, I guess it will take more time, more efforts and more heated and infinite discussion to come to an agreement on independence than it will take time to form a government which comes up with a feasible compromise. Besides, it took/takes the Czech (!) and Dutch government even longer to form a government.
The present political crisis is in my opinion a result of Belgium being an incomplete federal state: politicians (in both units) need to find the courage to complete the federalization of Belgium (e.g. reform of the legislative system and allocation of powers). Belgium as a federal state surely has a future: even hardcore Flemish nationalists would agree on that.

Wkr,
Pieterjan De Vlieger
Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Joan Costa Font said...

Absolutely agree in that small state federations are likely to fall apart especially if differences in language and culture stand behind. But, polarisation and a general inability of the federation to accomodate wide differences in preferences and values can well take place in assymetrically large federations( e.g., Catalonia). May be the problem then is that assymetrcal federalism is a myth of political scientists, rather that a feasible (real life) institutional option ( in cultutally heterogenenous states).

London School of Economics

The Americanization of European Political Science

For fourth time, this year the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference will be held almost at the same time, by late August and early September. This coincidence in the calendar occurs every two years since the ECPR adopted the formula of a General Conference in 2001. Some people can attend both the APSA and the ECPR meetings by traveling intensively, but others have chosen to alternate one year each. It took a long time to the ECPR to adopt the model of a conference based on multiple series of two-hour panels. For almost thirty years its main gathering was the annual Joint Sessions of Workshops, formed by a number of separate small groups, with 10 to 20 people, each meeting for four days. A typical comment was that if you were cleaver or lucky on choosing your workshop you could take great benefit from it, but otherwise you risked wasting your time. In contrast, with the conference formula the menu is broad and open to different interests.

This is just one minor but significant aspect of European political science following formulas previously developed in America. Actually the very creation of the European Consortium for Political Research was to a significant extent an American enterprise. As the story is told by Jean Blondel, one of the founding fathers of the ECPR, the idea to promote a model of “Americanized” political science in Europe was conceived as a synonymous for “modernization”. This was in contrast to the Parisian model at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques, better known as Sciences-Po, “which does not actively deserve its name since it is concerned only to a limited extent with what is conventionally regarded as political science in most parts of the world”. It was Blondel (born French but at the time at Essex, UK), together with Rudolf Wildenmann (at Manheim, Germany), Hans Daalder (at Leiden, the Netherlands), and Stein Rokkan (at Bergen, Norway), who undertook the initiative. “It was in New York city, in the magnificent glass Ford Foundation building, that the European Consortium was born, in the late spring of 1970”. Again in Blondel’s words, “only Americans, with their funds, but also with their skills in research management, could bring together a ‘representative’ body of European political scientists”.

The aim of the ECPR was to develop networks, exchanges and the building of a Europe-wide intellectual community following the American model. The Essex summer school, for instance, was essentially devoted to data analysis on the Michigan model. Also a European journal was launched, initially edited by Arend Lijphart (then at Leiden but later moved to California). Twenty five years later, Blondel estimated that the ECPR had not achieved “all the goals which some founders had in mind, those who wished European political science to become, if not first, at least a very close second”. During the last ten years, however, the ECPR has experienced increasing membership, the creation of numerous standing groups (equivalent to APSA ‘sections’ on different subfields), as well as of several summer schools and journals, and the adoption of the more lively formula of General Conference, which help stay pursuing that goal.

Reference

Jean Blondel’s story and reflections on the development of European political science during the 1960s and 1970s was published with the suggestive title ‘Amateurs into professionals’. It’s contained in the collective book edited by Hans Daalder, Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession (Pinter Publishers, 1997). To see it: CLICK

Institutional connections:

American political science at APSA: CLICK

European political science at ECPR: CLICK

COMMENTS

Alex Guerrero said...

And, obviously, the Americanization of the European Political Science goes far beyond the management of the professional gatherings. The real proof that the ECPR is only a second best to APSA is that the discipline is still divided in "Political Theory", "Political Economy", "Comparative Politics" and "American Politics". When will we see a "European Politics" sub-branch in the discipline?

Yale University


James Caporaso said...

Dear Dr. Colomer

I think you are absolutely right about the Americanization of European PS. One indicator is that the numberof manuscripts submitted by Europeans to American journals has escalated dramatically. I am the editor of Comparative Political Studies. Last year I believe we had over 70 manuscripts from outside the US, most from Europe. This year out of the first 100 manuscripts submitted, 49 were from outside the US. This is not just limited to t he UK and Northern Europe.

When I tell Europeans about this they are not surprised. They tell me that their universities are moving to an American model; one thing that means is more refereed articles, US style

Jim Caporaso

University of Washington

Laia Balcells said...

Very interesting article. One of the advantages of going to both conferences (and hence, travel intensively) -for those of us who are crazy enought to do it- is that, at least, we will be able to compare these "two worlds" very closely. Not sure about what to expect.

Laia Balcells

PhD Candidate at Yale University

Rein Taagepera said...

I am not aware of any other scientific discipline carrying out its yearly meeting as a series of workshops.
Just imagine physicists or biologists coming together to run a series of joint experiment workshops for a week...

Rein