Catch of the Day

Dan Larison, on the "special relationship."

The first thing to understand about the “special” relationship is that it doesn’t exist in the real world...

Somehow the alliance–which had nothing to do with attacking anyone–survived [Vietnam and Suez]. It will suffer no real damage from one vote on Syria.

Yup. There are good reasons for the US and UK to be close allies -- otherwise they wouldn't be! But that doesn' t mean they must always agree.

Indeed: to the extent that their behavior, as opposed to basic interests, have anything to do with keeping the alliance strong, surely they're better off disagreeing when their interests diverge.

I'll slip in one more point here...I don't want to overly minimize the importance of US military action. If what's expected now takes place, people are going to die in Syria. And to the extent that the action does or doesn't deter future use of chemical weapons? Sure, that's important. There's also the very real risk of something going wrong; as much as I've harped on Barack Obama's willingness to accept losses and walk away instead of getting stuck in quagmires, there's always the chance that this time is different. Not to mention the possibility that what the US does will have unexpected terrible consequences for Syria, and the region.

And yet...I do get the sense that a lot of people out there are treating this as an opportunity to re-argue the invasion of Iraq. As far as we know there's nothing even remotely similar to that going on here.

Look, again, I don't mean to dismiss this. Yes, missile strikes are a capital letter Act of War -- how could they not be? But to say that the US is Going to War just doesn't really capture what's been proposed. At least, what is apparently being proposed. As far as I can see, and keeping in mind all those potential downsides, the stakes here are actually fairly low here. At least for the US.

At any rate: nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Terre Roche, 60.

Right to the good stuff, as I'm glad that I've made it through the first stretch of west coast night games:


1. Larry Bartels on math (don't know that I've ever mentioned it as such, but Bartels is one of the people who you should pretty much always read on every subject).

2. Seth Masket (with Thad Krouser and Eric McGhee): party endorsements in primaries appear to have direct effects on voters.

3. Dean Baker on Social Security disability.

4. One more on Thatcher: Carah Ong has comments from Reagan and Bush administration oral histories about her.

5. And flacks vs. reporters.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Marty Krofft, 76. Among the strangest things of the strange 1970s was the dominance of kids network TV, for a while, by Sid and Marty Krofft. I'm pretty sure the ultimate example of this was Lidsville -- which I certainly watched when it was on -- but I'm open to arguments that one of the others was even stranger.

The good stuff:

1. Dylan Matthews on Margaret Thatcher's economic record.

2. Nicole Cliffe on Thatcher.

3. Jamelle Bouie on Thatcher, Reagan, ideology, and time.

4. Dan Drezner on Thatcher and IR.

5. And Thatcher and music, from Matthew Horton at NME and from Dave Weigel. After reflection, by the way, I'd decided that Weigel is just trolling when he claims that the only anti-Reagan line he can remember from US music is from Don Henley.

Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, RIP. 

I find I have very little to say about her. What matters about Thatcher, or at any rate about Thatcherism, is that there really was a significant change among elites about the power and efficacy of markets. My general sense -- and to be sure, this is an impression, nothing hard and rigidly empirical about it -- is that in the 1960s and through the mid-1970s, there really was a sense among many that markets were old-fashioned hokum, and that bureaucracies and other centralized planners could do many things far more efficiently. Oh, not Soviet-style central planners; by 1970, certainly, no one looked to the USSR (or China) as an economic model. 

I'd put it this way: I suspect (and again, I have no solid study that I know of to cite here, but I think it's correct) that if you looked around in 1965 the only people who would be referencing Adam Smith, at least in the US, would be a very small group of committed Goldwater conservatives. If you looked around in 1995, Adam Smith gets used by everyone across the ideological spectrum -- and perhaps more by liberals than by conservatives, who seem more interested in Ayn Rand once liberals dip into Smith and discover that they like him.

Of course, what liberals learned from Smith isn't to have "faith" in markets; it's to respect and use the power of markets. 

Now, how much of that is Thatcher, how much is Reagan, how much is generational, how much is a consequence of the economics of the time...I have no idea. For that matter, I don't even know that the change happened at all; maybe it was just that people did a good job of selling that change. I don't think so, though; policies such as the ACA and cap-and-trade really do reflect something different. Whatever it is, Thatcher was certainly the face of it, and I'd say deservedly so. 

Oy, Brooks

Apparently there's something in the Official Blog Contract that once in a while we just all have to react to whatever David Brooks is saying that day. I think I'm going to mostly be a slacker on this one...if you want to know what I agree with, see what Jamelle Bouie had to say (hmmm...guess I should actually read it instead of just relying on the tweet version...checking...yeah, I mostly agree); if you want a smart opposing viewpoint (that is, opposing what I think is correct), check what Matt Yglesias says. I'm usually up for arguing political institutions with Yglesias, but I'll pass on it today...meanwhile, I haven't read what everyone else has said, but I'm still gobsmacked at the idea (leading off the Brooks column) that anyone could think of the British political system of 1900-1920 as a success, given that those years would include the greatest political failure of the modern world, the Great War.

To be fair, the Brits only deserve part of the blame for WWI, but really...you know, I could go on, but it's just not worth it. I'm sure there are more foolish things one could say about 1900-1920, but it would take some doing, and it's plenty enough to remind me why I don't read Brooks except when these Official Brooks Commenting Periods come around.

Yeesh.

"Moral Legitimacy " and Majorities

Jonathan Chait is puzzled:

I understand the practical difficulties associated with a Labor-Lib Dem coalition (among other things, it would rely on the votes of smaller parties). What I don't get this is objection that such a coalition would "have no moral legitimacy."

Here's the objection, from Nile Gardiner of Heritage over at NRO:

It would have no moral legitimacy. Labour lost heavily in this election, and the Liberals were humiliated. The Conservatives won the largest number of seats and votes by a large margin, yet will be kept out of power. The public and much of the media will be overwhelmingly opposed to such a government.

J. Chait:  Isn't this fairly obvious?  I assume that the answer is more or less along the same logic as that of the Democrats ignoring the will of the voters by not doing exactly what Republicans wanted after the Scott Brown election.

More seriously...Chait is of course correct.  There is no "correct" democratic answer to the quandry: Labour surely lost the election, the Lib-Dems surely didn't win it, and yet combined they surely do have more seats (and received far more votes) than the Conservative Party by itself. 

To me, this is an excellent argument for a system that forces compromise before the election (that is, by building two large, coalition-type parties) and after the government is formed (by using a system of separated institutions sharing powers), instead of a multiparty system that forces compromise after the election and a parliamentary system that readily enacts whatever the resulting government wants.  But whether you agree with me or not about that, what it does help to make clear is that any majorities in large nations are constructed, not natural, just as James Madison realized -- which means, in my opinion, being careful about how much authority one gives to those majorities.

Proportional

A bit of postmortuming on the Brit election...first, some political science links.  Eric Voeten at the Monkey Cage explains what's known about minority governments (and asks for more, so check back to comments there -- don't forget that the Monkey Cage gets great substantive comments).   Then head over to Enik Rising, where Seth Masket speculates about Duvreger's Law. 

(Hey, we get great comments here, too -- no offensive to the regulars, and thanks for your comments).

Next...my main interests in the election have been (1) the entertainment value, which I have to say it delivered on pretty well; and, (2) the first-past-the-post/PR debate and other questions in democratic institutions, parties, and representation.  I posted about that before the election, and Hedrick Hertzberg, p.r. supporter, responded by giving a stripped down version of his case for proportional representation.  As I said originally, my position is mostly neutral, and cautious (and this morning I saw David Butler, the British political scientist, make almost the exact same case on the BBC; as he said, all such systems have their strengths and weaknesses). 

What I really don't understand is how proponents of proportional representation -- and multiparty systems -- get around how problematic post-election maneuvering to form a government can be.  Of course, the two are not identical, as shown by not only yesterday's results but the general failure of any UK party to reach 50% for a long time.  Still, first-past-the-post does, usually, yield a two-party system and therefore majority governments, while proportional systems tend to yield multiparty systems, with no party able to organize government on its own. 

Which results in a situation such as the one now in the UK, or the one now in Iraq -- election over, votes are counted, and all that's left is for the elites to bargain with each other about, well, who gets to be a winner and who gets to be a loser.  Obviously, it's not as if the voters had no say in the whole thing, since their votes do set the stage for the current process.  But after that...well, as far as I can see, the election results could yield any number of things about which I've seen speculation:

• A Tory minority government;
• A Tory-LibDem coalition government;
• A Labor-LibDem coalition government;
• Or, an all-parties government.

Moreover, as the price for forming such governments, it's possible that Britain could wind up with an entirely new electoral system, or one of the party leaders might have to be cashiered, or who knows what kinds of policy deals might be made.  All of which, again, could happen -- one of which will happen -- without any further input from the voters.  To me, it's just astonishing that people find that sort of arrangement clearly, inherently, more democratic that what the United States has (or what the Brits would have if they slimmed down to two and a quarter parties, instead of, what is it now, two and two-thirds?). 

And that's not the only trouble with proportional systems, just the one that strikes me as particularly problematic.  There's also the potential for minor parties to hijack the system (the Israel problem), the potential for serious instability (the Italy problem), and one I'll include just for Matt Yglesias -- the complexities of voting when it's not a binary choice between the "ins" and the "outs."  (Of course, the American system, as Yglesias never hesitates to point out, manages to make such distinctions impossible even with only two parties).  But none of those really bothers me; it's the post-election negotiating that I just can't work my way around.

Once again: I'm not arguing that single district, simple plurality electoral systems are necessarily better; they have their problems, too, and as I've said, I'm agnostic about how the relative strengths and weaknesses balance in the abstract, and so my inclination is to be hesitant about change.  I just, really, don't understand why enthusiastic proponents of proportional systems don't see post-election coalition formation as deeply problematic as far as democracy is concerned. 

Election Day (with an extra "u" in there somewhere)

And, in There Will Always Be An England news:

"We wouldn't want people coming in with overt political clothing," says Mr Tonkin. However it is all about context. "There's a candidate standing in Westminster as a pirate. And if he comes in to vote in a pirate costume as is likely, we won't turn him away. The same goes for any supporters coming to vote as pirates." 

Via Sullivan.  It's a great article, from the BBC; I recommend, as they say, the whole thing.  To get you even more in the mood, here's the Python Election Night Special.  That's:

Malcolm Peter Brian Telescope Adrian Umbrella Stand Jasper Wednesday (pops mouth twice) Stoatgobbler John Raw Vegetable (sound effect of horse whinnying) Arthur Norman Michael (blows squeker) Featherstone Smith (blows whistle) Northgot Edwards Harris (fires pistol, which goes 'whoop') Mason (chuff-chuff-chuff) Frampton Jones Fruitbat Gilbert (sings) 'We'll keep a welcome in the' (three shots, stops singing) Williams If I Could Walk That Way Jenkin (squeker) Tiger-draws Pratt Thompson (sings) 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' Darcy Carter (horn) Pussycat 'Don't Sleep In The Subway' Barton Mannering (hoot, 'whoop') Smith.

And last but not least, via the Monkey Cage, this BBC initiative is awesome but maybe just a little scary; I'm not looking forward to the White House lit as red or blue in 2012.

Good luck to all the candidates and the voters, and just a little reminder that y'all are pikers when it comes to democracy what with your one little "X" scrawled on the ballot, compared to the dozens of voting opportunities we have over here -- you'll never know the patriotic pleasure of trying to guess which candidate you've never heard of to support for some office that you have no idea what it does. 

The Brits and Electoral Systems

I haven't been blogging on the British election because, well, I haven't had much to add to what's already out there.  Although it certainly has been an entertaining contest, and promises to deliver a suspense-filled and fun election night (I'll probably go ahead and live-tweet that).

I should say a little something about electoral reform, and the question of proportional representation vs. first-past-the-post elections.  And not just so that I can link to John Cleese, since odds are you saw that already (via at least Chait and Sullivan).  The first thing to note is that, in my view at least, there is no consensus among political scientists on the issue, although there certainly are plenty of people with strong opinions, especially -- at least in my experience -- among the advocates of p.r.  What they get wrong, I think, is that the ultimate goal of a political system cannot be to accurately reflect the strength of each party in parliament, much less accurately reflect the strength of all the views of the citizens in parliament, which is essentially impossible anyway.  No, what matters more is whether the government is responsive to citizens.  The composition of parliament is a means to that end.  So in a basically majoritarian system, a method of translating votes into seats that magnifies majorities isn't inherently problematic.

Of course, the British system doesn't just magnify majorities; it creates them (at least it usually does, by turning plurality parties into majority governments).  But that's inherent in any parliamentary, majoritarian system.  One way or another, a majority is going to be created, whether it's created by rules and customs that build a two-party system, or rules that turn plurality votes into majorities in the legislature, or by forming coalition governments from minority parties.  It doesn't strike me, again, that any one of these is inherently best or worst.

What I would try to avoid is a system that yields random and unpredictable results.  The idea that, in this election, strategic voters may not know what to do because they cannot predict what the parties will do after the election does not seem like a good thing to me.   But whether that would be helped or not by switching to a proportional system is not anything close to a sure thing.  And on electoral reform, my instincts are to be cautious unless there's a clear violation of democracy that needs to be remedied, such as the massive rural bias that the US remedied with one person, one vote in the 1960s.  I don't see anything close to that in using first-past-the-post instead of p.r.  That's not to say that I'd be against reform, but I'd recommend proceeding cautiously.  You don't want to be (if I can slip in a baseball comparison here) a Bud Selig, constantly changing the rules to react to the latest complaints. 

Majorities and Majorities (Brit edition)

If you ask Americans, they'll tell you that a two-party system stinks -- solid majorities believe that the US would be better off with a third party, and generally we have no shortage of people who affect disdain for our large, coalition-style parties.  And they don't like the electoral college, preferring simple majority voting.

Alas, these preferences work poorly together.  I do wonder how Americans would manage to put up with, for example, the current situation in the British elections.  We have three parties polling within percentage points of each other, to begin with, meaning no party will get anywhere near to 50%.  But that doesn't matter, because what actually matters is how many seats each party wins in Parliament -- and because these seats are apportioned (like in the US House) via a "first-past-the-post" simple plurality system (and not proportional representation), some parties will do better, and some worse, than their raw vote totals would indicate: Labour is expected to win a higher percentage of seats than their percentage of the vote, while the Liberal-Democrats are expected to win fewer seats.  Moreover, assuming that no party wins a majority of seats, the next step is negotiations between the parties to form a new government, with the results only vaguely dependent on the exact number of seats each party holds, which in turn was only somewhat dependent on the overall number of votes each party received. 

With that buildup, you may be expecting a "we do it right, they do it wrong" conclusion, but you're not going to get one.  I like the American system very much...but I've been convinced that one should be cautious about redesigning political systems; while there's no guarantee that democracies over time develop institutions that suit them, it's awfully hard for outsiders (or even insiders) to know which constitutional quirks are mistakes, and which are strongly connected to the local political culture.  What I can say is that a quick look at variation across systems is a good reminder that thinking of democracy as simple majoritarianism is not only problematic in theory, but also doesn't correspond to any actual political system that anyone has devised.  The Brits certainly have at least on the surface a majority rules system once the government is in place (at least among the pols: pols vs. the bureaucrats is a whole 'nother story), but getting there has very little to do with simple majority rule.  And the Brits seem to be on the whole just fine with that (at least as far as I'm aware; I'm no specialist, but I do follow along a bit) -- although we'll see if that's still the case following this election.

What that means to me, in terms of institutional design, is that making sure that the majority gets their way can never be the sole goal when it comes to organizing democratic institutions.  Majorities are important, but as I'll keep repeating, democracy is rule of the people, not rule of the majority.