HARVARD ENGLISH RELENTS. An announcement posted on the department's web page:

Announcement: By mutual consent of the poet and the English Department, the Morris Gray poetry reading by Tom Paulin, originally scheduled for Thursday, November 14th, will not take place. The English Department sincerely regret the widespread consternation that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided on last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin's lifetime accomplishments as a poet.

With the election over but the new Congress not yet in office; with the UN vote over but the inspectors not yet back on the ground; now seems like a good time to step back and take a longer view, look at the bigger picture. Perhaps that's why Josh Chafetz and Matthew Yglesias both have new reading lists up: recommended works in political theory and political philosophy. I'll recommend 'em both without further comment-- after all, the point is to start reading books, not to keep reading commentary about commentary about lists of books! On that note, I'm turning my computer off for the rest of the day.

No, really.

UPDATE: See the follow-ups, amendments, and additions from Kieran Healey, Chris Bertram, Armed Liberal, Pejman Pundit, and ther irrepressible Chris Sciabarra. (For what it's worth, my opinion is that Josh's list should precede Matthew's and Kieran's, and that the others include a number of excellent and interesting books which aren't nearly so fundamental as the ones on these three lists.)

This is a nice exchange among scholar-bloggers. Chris Sciabarra is a maverick professor of philosophy. Kieran-- whom I know, just a little, from our shared time in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows at Princeton-- is a professor of sociology. Chris Bertram is a professor of philosophy. Matthew is a Harvard undergrad philosophy major; Josh is an Oxford political theory grad student. Pejman is, I think, a practicing lawyer (?) but his autobio is filled with enough paeans to the University of Chicago (where he got two degrees) as to show a scholar's temperment. (Armed Liberal doesn't, as far as I can tell, have an online autobio, presumably for privacy reasons.)

Why don't I join in further? Two reasons. 1) I just don't have that much to add to Josh's, Matthew's, and Kieran's lists. 2) It seems too much like work! Between syllabus construction and helping to put together the U of C's epic political theory general exam reading list, I do this sort of thing too often as it is...

Hmm. Now that most of the tenured social sciences and humanities faculty on my campus have signed a letter about Campus Watch-- a careful letter that allows professors with very divergent political views to sign it, unlike the Judith Butler petition I've blogged about before-- some of the fun has been taken out of my little crusade against the website's attack on the University of Chicago. Keeping it up would start to look like currying favor with my senior colleagues. (Many of the signers are tenured members of my department, and at least one is an administrator who was involved in hiring me.) This would be especially tacky since they had the decency not to ask junior faculty to sign their letter; they deliberately avoided creating the temptation to curry favor, or the fear of retribution among dissenters. So I think I'm going to quit talking about Campus Watch now.* But I would like the record to show that my first post on the subject preceded this faculty letter by nearly two months-- and that it documents a public disagreement I've had with a tenured member of my department on these subjects, so at the time I could hardly have been accused of sucking up. And I'll close by beating my drum one last time: If Campus Watch is sufficiently embarrassed by its University of Chicago reports-- filled with stories that have been discredited, irrelevancies, rumors, and complaints abou the peaceful expression of anti-Israeli views-- that it feels the need to put disclaimers on them, then it ought to be embarrassed enough to take them down. The statement by the University's Hillel Center seems to me the final nail in the coffin of those reports' credibility.

So the complete arc of my comments on Campus Watch:
September 19
September 23
September 26
September 27
September 29
October 22
November 6

*(That is, unless they really do something new to annoy me...)

I've previously called attention to the work Australian political scientist Bill Maley has done on refugee policy. He has a concise and powerful new statement of his arguments here.

Not only does Campus Watch now have special disclaimers on its University of Chicago reports here and here. Now it has added a little thumbs-up icon to recommended articles (to distinguish them, in part, from all the pieces it links to by the scholars it criticizes)-- and on the University of Chicago survey page, it declines to even recommend its own campus reports.

Again I'll say: if they've figured out that they should be embarrassed by those reports, then they ought to take them down and apologize, not just downplay and disclaim them.

One more post-election point. I've blogged here several times on when it might make sense to vote for your local pro-gun Democrat, even though he'll deliver control of a chamber of Congress to an anti-gun party, or for your local pro-choice-Republican, even though she'll deliver it to a pro-life party. The voters have now had their say, and they seem less willing to overlook party in Congressional races than they used to be, and less willing than they are in gubernatorial ones (which is rational, as discussed earlier). New York and all of New England now have Republican governors, and at least five of those seven are moderate-to-left Republicans. But Connie Morella lost her attempt to get to the House on the basis of an "I don't agree with my party" platform. Max Cleland didn't make it, either. The gubernatorial map now looks very mixed; the House-and-Senate maps now look pretty sharply red-state/blue-state divided. Voters figured out that party control matters in Congress, and voted accordingly. Zell Miller and Lincoln Chafee are going to start to feel pretty lonely.

This results in the loss of some useful caucus-dissent; and may encourage the sort of majority-party-overreach that contributes to electoral see-sawing. As I've said, I want there to be pro-choice, pro-gay Republicans, and anti-tax, pro-trade Democrats. But today we're one step closer to something like parliamentary responsible-party government, as both Congressional parties look increasingly internally homogenous.

THIRD PARTY OUTCOMES: On the third-party questions below: Yep, there was a break away from 3rd parties after all. In South Dakota, the L, even though he had withdrawn and thrown his support to Thune, exceeded the R-D gap. But I think that was the only Senate seat tipped by one third-party candidate. In Missouri, neither the G nor the L exceeded the Carnahan-Talent gap, though both combined did (meaning that if Carnahan had somehow managed to get both those groups in her camp she could've won). In Minnesota, neither the Indepedence nor Green candidates (though, again, both combined) exceeded the Mondale-Coleman gap, and that's in a state that, for the moment, has both a senator and a governor from the Independence Party. NH Senate: the L is close to but not at the Sununu-Shaheen gap. It's actually striking how many Senate races were blowouts (look here for the tallies). There are R-D gaps of 5 points or less in only MN, MO, SD, NH.

Less of a 3rd-party collapse in gubernatorial races, suggesting that voters understood that their decisive Senate vote might become thedecisive Senate vote. For governor: L solidly bigger than the gap in Alabama; the Republicans can fairly think that the Ls cost them that one assuming even a slight R-over-D preference among southern Ls. Arizona governor: Mahoney twice the size of the gap, costing R Salmon the race-- though Mahoney's listed as an independent and I don't know where his support came from. California governor: Neither G nor L, though both combined, bigger than the gap. That means that California's not as much in play for Republicans as they might briefly think; they were hardly going to get that 5% G vote, and even the 2% L vote is likely out of reach because California Libertarians are a much more pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-drug group than are southern guns-and-taxes Libertarians. Maine: G (9%!) greater than the gap, but it's unlikely the losing R could have picked them up under any circumstances. Mass: it would have taken not only G+L but also the votes of "other" Johnson to make up the D-R gap. MN governor is a special case; Independence candidate and former Congressman Tim Penny exceeds the gap, but 16% isn't very impressive considering his resume and the fact that he's from the incumbent governor's party. NY: even had every last Golisano voter gone to McCall (unlikely!) it wouldn't have tipped the race. Incomplete results make it look likely that an L tipped Oregon governor to the Ds. An "other" tipped OK to the Ds. An "other" tipped Vermont to the Rs. L Thompson, Tommy Thomspon's brother, tipped Wisconsin to the Ds. The L is within a hair's breadth of the gap in Wyoming, but the D would have scraped it out even if every L had gone R.

A quick scan of CNN's list of the competitive House races: L greater than the gap twice, G greater than the gap twice, other greater than the gap twice; but Colorado 7 is all three, so these six thrid-party candidates were in just four districts. But G did well in a district that went D, L did well in a district that went R. Continuing to assume that Ls break more for Rs than for Ds, no L actually tipped a race. The Green tipped Colorado 7 to the Rs (though R+L>D+G).

G alone greater than the gap: Maine gov (but the Ds won). L alone bigger than the gap: SD Senate, Alabama, Oregon, Wisconsin gov (each of which the Ds won, meaning that the Ls at least arguably tipped them). Other or independent greater than the gap: Arizona Vermont, Minnesota, Oklahoma gov. No more than four House races, and probably only two, affected by the presence of third-party candidates.

The Dems seem to have neutralized the Green threat this time out. The Republicans still have a Libertarian problem; but unlike in 2000, it didn't cost them the Senate. It didn't even cost them their gubernatorial majority. The party Perot began and the one Ventura spun off from it are now basically dead.

Note: Most of the above makes the disputed-by-Greens assumption that all Green voters would otherwise be Democrats; (except where noted) the genuinely-false assumption that all Libertarian voters would otherwise be Republicans (I know this is false, because it was certainly false for me for Illinois governor); and the probably-false though I think not-terribly false assumption that all third-party voters would have gone to the polls, or could possibly have been motivated to go to the polls, in the absence of the third-party candidates. I’m well aware of the arguments around these claims. But from the perspective of major-party strategists, I think these are the working assumptions, i.e. Democrats think that every Green voter is someone who would vote for their candidate if there were no Green in the race.

UPDATE: The Alabama figures are in flux, and the R may pull it out.

I get to rightfully claim a) that my predictions were less wrong than Dan Drezner's and b) that I was one of not many people who said that Sununu would beat Shaheen. (Another of those people, Chip Griffin in NRO's Corner, is a New Hampshire hometown acquaintance of mine.) But I'll renounce bragging rights, since I had the big story wrong-- and even went out of my way in the middle of the day yesterday to say that I didn't believe there was a late Republican surge...

Larry Sabato senses a last-minute GOP drift in the Senate. "Suddenly, a 50-50 Senate (Republican-controlled) looks as likely as a 51-49 or 52-48 Democratic Senate." And TNR has collected several recent pieces into a "how the Democrats blew it page. Sabato and TNR are much closer to being insiders than I am and presumably have information I don't. But I'm sticking with: House GOP +2, Senate no change. UPDATE: Turns out that last minute GOP surge was real after all. Check out Kaus' funny pbservation that the NYT had the big story over the weekend but couldn't bear to believe it. But I won't gloat at the NYT, since I didn't believe it either. (Neither did Kaus, who blogged it yesterday as the "phantom surge."

One minor but interesting indicator to keep an eye on tonight: third party votes. No one believed that the 2000 election would be so close. Everyone believes that the 2002 elections willbethiscloseorcloser. How many of Nader's 2000 voters will feel driven back to the D column? How many Senate races are tipped by Greens or Libertarians? Look for the L vote to exceed the D-R gap in NH Senate, Mass governor, GA Senate, MO Senate, but maybe not SD Senate since the L suspended campaigning and endorsed Thune. Look for significant D defection to the Greens in CA gov, as disaffected lefties decide that Gray has a lock on the race. Golisano in NY gov & Penney in Minn gov are special cases; their vote totals are going to be big and therefore, for current purposes, uninteresting. Keep an eye on those 1%-5% candidates. In general, we have a test of the idea that voters feel pressed to vote major-party when the election is close. Those who vote third-party today are either really determined, or really convinced that the two majors don't differ enough on the issues important to them. The SD dropout shows that not even all candidates are that determined; but a lot of voters still are.

If today we end up with a 48-48 nation instead of Kaus' 50-50 nation, then Ds & Rs come under immediate strategic pressure to get those third-party votes; and this is tricky to do while keeping overall positions near the median. (The Ds can't go green, or embrace L drug legalization; the Rs can't swing very far toward L posiitons on taxes and spending.) There were Rs who noticed this in 2000 and blamed the Ls for costing them the Senate. This time either Ds awill blame Gs or Rs will blame Ls for costing them the Senate; and the major parties will start to devote staff and resources to neutralizing these threats to their flanks. Bad news would be D-R collusion in tightening of ballot access requirements, as happened after John Anderson's 1980 campaign. Useless news would be denouncing the third parties, as the Ds have been doing to Nader for two years now. (Today's third party voters aren't going to be swayed by denunciations; they'll be alienated by them.) Interesting news would be major parties trying to co-opt selected minor-party issues that they don't think will be noticed by or scary to centrist voters.

A few more words, and a second thought, on Mark Kleiman's express-voting idea. Mark wonders at the possibility that it could be a denial of equal protection to speed up everybody's voting (thereby allowing more even of the non-express-voters to vote) instead of preventing many thousands of people from voting at all because there are too few fancy new voting machines.

"Note that the proposal would advantage, rather than disadvantaging, voters taking the slow option. Their wait in line becomes shorter as large numbers of other voters were diverted to the fast line. Clearly, the people choosing the fast line who were slow voters would be disadvantaged compared to the people choosing the fast line who were fast voters, but each of them (though not all of them) would have the option of avoiding that disadvantage by waiting in the slow line.... But if it's a denial of equal protection to allow some voters to vote in return for their promise to vote quickly, what is it to deny hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to vote at all? I think the technical term is 'Straining at gnats and swallowing camels.'"

Under the circumstances I have a lot of sympathy for Mark's proposal. But I still think there's a problem with this particular gnat. Denying hundreds of thousands of more or less randomly selected persons the opportunity to vote at all is going to raise fewer equal protection/ VRA questions than will a procedure that makes it more likely that any given person will be able to vote-- but allows a bigger increase in that chance for literate English speakers and straight-ticket voters than for others. In a democracy with a different history I think literacy tests for voting would be a fine idea. In our democracy, they're considered particularly constitutionally odious, and for good reason. (Someday, perhaps, Jim Crow will be far enough in the past that literacy could be reintroduced as a relevant consideration; but we're not there yet.) And equal protection/ VRA questions demand that one look at relative changes, not only absolute ones.

So if this were a Broward-only-election, I think that would be the end of the story; express-voting would be impermissible. The catch is that it's not. If we were to resurrect the avowedly one-time-only equal protection claims made in Bush v Gore, then the variation across counties might outweigh the variation within Broward. That is, the unfairness to Browardites relative to the rest of the state could count for more than the unfairness to less-literate Browardites relative to more-literate ones. If Broward is more black or Hispanic than the rest of the state (which I assume but don't know) then the VRA might push the same way, meaning that we wouldn't need the Bush v Gore argument at all.

So, on reconsideration, I think it's at least legally plausible that express-voting might be permissible. Administrative personnel and government officials have an obligation not to knowingly act in violation of the constitution, even if what they want to do is reasonable and democratic, and even if a court wouldn't be able to stop them in time. (That, I take it, is InstaPundit's point.) But if there's room for legitimate legal and constitutional doubt, the officials' own best understanding of the constitution can allow them to try things, even if a court might later disagree with them. And, having had an extra day to think about it, I now think there would be such doubt. That means that I think I side with Mark; this would be a reasonable thing for Broward officials to attempt, under the circumstances. The best interpretation of equal protection and the VRA might rule the experiment out; but this is not so certain as to require constitutional bad faith on the part of those who might attempt it. [Final note: Mark implies that I'm a law professor, which I am only in the minor way that I've taught some courses that were cross-listed with law-- constitutional theory, philosophy of law. I don't have a law degree, and I don't have an appointment in the law school, only in political science. I'm a serious student of constitutional law, but not really a scholar of it.]

As is the case for InstaPundit (see link immediately below), some of the demands of my academic day job have gotten in the way of blogging-- so I'm delinquent on part 3 of my Kaus vs. Judis series and so I was too late to supply Mickey Kaus with ammunition for his radio debate with Judis' co-author. Sorry about that! But some of what I'm going to say is already in this review of the Judis-Teixeira book.

InstaPundit has a very nice post on the life of the professor. Check it out...

Those in academia or in Chicago might know, but others might not, that the University of Chicago is in a neighborhood called Hyde Park, several miles south of downtown and smack in the middle of Chicago's overwhelmingly black South Side. (Hyde Park itself is, statistically if not always socially, an exceptionally racially mixed neighborhood.) This has the odd-for-me effect that political direct mailings, presumably sorted by zip code or something similar, treat me as part of a political demographic very different from my actual one. In the last week I've gotten several Democratic mailings that were clearly of the rally-the-black-base-and-increase-turnout variety, not attempts to persuade swing voters. (As noted below, I am a swing voter in the only genuinely competitive election I'll be voting in, the dreadful race for Attorney General between an inexperienced corrupt hack an opponent of any reform in Illinois' death penalty system. I'm currently, unhappily, leaning toward the hack, even though she supports the death penalty, too; at least she's mildly pro-reform.) I've gotten robocalls from Jesse White, the black Democratic Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton who is in general being used to rally black turnout and being kept away from swing audiences, reminding me to get out and vote.

I've got no real point here, certainly no complaint. It's just a little odd. Living in Hyde Park has lots of moments like that, and as a white in America I've never before been even a local-minority in this way. I've certainly been both a partisan and a religious minority, and have often thought that I was surrounded by political advertising that couldn't possibly be targeted at me. But that was blanket television advertising, not micro-targeted mailings and phone calls. A new experience.

The always-worth-reading Mark Kleiman wonders whether the gassing of the Moscow theater violated international law. I was sure that I recalled-- from the bad old days of Waco-- that the international law governing chemical weapons explicitly allowed for its use in domestic law enforcement. I recalled correctly. The Chemical Wespons Convention reads in relevant part:

Article I Section 5: 5. Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.
Article II Section 7: 7. "Riot Control Agent" means: Any chemical not listed in a Schedule, which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.
[These two sections clearly allow for tear gas as a device of riot control, just not for warfare. More importantly, when the treaty bans "chemical weapons" it defnes these as]
Article II Section 1:1. "Chemical Weapons" means the following, together or separately:
(a) Toxic chemicals and their precursors, except where intended for purposes not prohibited under this Convention, as long as the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes
[And it does on to define the key phrase:]
Article II Section 9: 9. "Purposes Not Prohibited Under this Convention" means: [...]
(d) Law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.

I presume that the Iraqi-Kurdish case does not fall under this exception. Iraq gassed whole villages in the context of a war; the fact that they were Iraqi citizens doesn't make it "law enforcement."

[Also on Mark's page: a proposal for express-voting booths to alleviate the too-many-voters, too-few-new-machines crunch he foresees in Broward County. Undoubtedly this is a reasonable accommodation. But I doubt whether courts would permit it. It would pose genuine equal protection problems (unlike the bogus equal protection claims from an earlier Florida election). Those who are more literate, native speakers of one of the ballot's languages (I don't know how many languages the ballot is printed in, but inevitably it's fewer than the number of native languages of the voters) and those who are willing to vote a straight-party ticket would be significantly advantaged; they'd be much more likely to be able to vote. Of course, the status quo advantages those who have two hours to spare to vote. But I strongly suspect that courts would find rationing-by-queue to be tolerably impartial, or at least much preferable to rationing-by-straight-ticket-voting-or-literacy.]

Dan Drezner and I, blogging political scientists, have agreed to post our predictions for Tuesday; winner gets bragging rights. (If either of us beats UVA political scientist Larry Sabato we get serious bragging rights.) In principle we're waiting until 5 pm CST, but I'll be at the Rorty-Habermas debate then, so I'm going to post now even at the risk of Dan having access to the Friday afternoon news. So here goes:

House: GOP +2 (because of the point made below about the House and midterm elections)
Senate: no change (the Republicans had a real chance, but bad economic news and the odd events in NJ and Minnesota cost them.)
While this isn't part of Dan's and my challenge, I'll go out on a limb and call particular races-- based on hunches and impression, not on political science.
NH: R
MN: D
NJ: D
MO: R (switch)
NC: R
SD: R (switch)
CO: D (switch)
AK: D (switch)
LA: D

Everyone else seems to think NH will pick Shaheen. I think the Smith write-in movement will collapse on election day, not because of W's visit to my hometown (NH doesn't traditionally like Bushes very much) but because the hardcore NH Republicans who resent Sununu for beating Smith really, really despise Shaheen... UPDATE: But the NH political reporter I trust the most, the Union Leader's John DiStaso, calls it for Shaheen.

One point about the "history-defying" character of Republicans holding steady or picking seats up at the midterm election: this is less interesting than it appears, and less interesting than people are making it out to be. In particular, if the House GOP holds steady that doesn't mean that the Republicans were tactical geniuses or have some curse-defying level of popularity. Those big midterm losses are heavily concentrated among weak freshmen who got swept in in presidential coattails. But the House GOP lost seats in 2000 (and in 1998 and 1996). There's no big freshman class of people who wouldn't have been in the House but for W's win in 2000. (An obvious point: while the popular vote has no particular constitutional meaning, losing the popular vote does not make for strong coattails.) Indeed, weakness has been weeded out of the House on both sides pretty ruthlessly in the last eight years. The major predictor of the size of the House swing against a President's party in the midterm election is the size of the swing to the President's party during the Presidential election, measured in House seats gained. The history-defying accomplishment was losing seats while gaining the Presidency in 2000. Defying the curse of the midterm election just follows from that.

Kaus vs. Judis, Part 2: The Parties. (See Part 1, the voters, here.) Starting from the baseline of the median voter theorem, which (roughly) yields Mickey Kaus' 50-50 nation thesis (though with the complications noted here introduced by the electoral system), yesterday I looked at some reasons to doubt that voters act as the theorem requires (that is, as pure policy-preference maximizers, carefully voting for the candidate in each election who comes closest to their own policy views). Today I'll introduce doubt into the theorem's view about party behavior-- that is, that parties are free to, and wish to, act as pure vote-maximizing firms, willing to move as close to the center as necessary in order to secure the median voter's vote. Tomorrow I'll take these more complicated models and apply them to the debate between the Kaus-Downs prediction of stalemate and the Judis-Teixeira prediction of Democratic dominance. [Note to Dan Drezner: Brooks' "Patio Man" is similar in kind to the Judis theory-- demographic and cultural trends generating an advantage for one party. I won't treat it separately; it differs from Judis on questions of sociology, which I'm not competent to judge, rather than on questions of political science, which I'm currently pretending to be competent to judge!]

[Question to self: if blogging continues to lead me to write political science instead of just venting about the news of the day, why not write political science in some medium that will help get me tenure instead of on a blog? Hmm... good question...]

OK, parties. Downs recognized, way back in 1957, that parties had some constraints on their ability to lunge to the center. They have bases to appeal to, bases on which they depend for volunteer effort, money, and so on. An especially energetic and far-from-the-center base can credibly threaten to stay home or split into a third party. By doing so they will certainly hurt their preferred candidate's chance of winning right now, but they think that they may move the party back toward them in the long term. (This should all sound familiar-- Nader-Gore, Buchanan- GWB. The third parties in question are those that clearly occupy a position along the regular left-right spectrum, farther from the center than either dominant party. Third parties for which that's not true-- the Reform Party under Perot, the Libertarian Party whenever it draws left-civil libertarians and drug reformers from the Democratic base in addition to anti-tax/ pro-gun types from the Republican base-- present special complications. The whole Median Voter Theorem analysis depends on there being a single left-right dimension onto which candidates can clearly be placed in order. Analyzing those parties has to wait until we relax that assumption, which we'll do tomorrow when we look at niche voting.)

Where people engage in partisan politics for purely power-seeking purposes (you wouldn't believe me if I told you that was an accident, would you?), we should expect Downs-like behavior. But partisan politics, especially post-patronage, (stop that!) just doesn't have enough material rewards available to keep tens of thousands of activists active. Much electioneering work is pretty unpleasant. (I hated, hated, hated going door-to-door, even more than I hated collecting ballot-petition signatures.) There aren't that many politically-appointed positions to go around. For that matter, the elected positions themselves don't pay very much, relative to private sector work. We might assume that people run for office out of a taste for power, but what keeps their activist-supporters, staffers, and assorted hangers-on in the game?

There just doesn't seem to be any reason to suppose that voters have strong, fixed policy preferences, but activists don't. The reverse is surely more likely. A big share of partisan energy, in short, comes from people who want to bring the voters' preferences to them, rather than adjusting themselves to the voters' preferences; and those people often think it's possible to do so.

There could be a sort of Darwinian selection within the party to bring the Roves and Morrisses and McAuliffes to power, since they're the ones who succeed in getting people elected while those who want to bring the voters to them don't. And I think there's probably growing pressure in that direction. But that supposes that the Roves etc can indefinitely win elections with dampened enthusiasm from the activists and the base. They may think they can; but they may be wrong about that.

And even the most purely Machiavellian partisan, perceiving a stalemate at the center, may decide to invest some energy in rallying the base. Boosting union and black turnout has lately been a pretty important strategy for Democrats, arguably more important than pouring endless energy into battling over that last voter in the middle. The same was clearly true for Republicans in 1994, when Gorver Norquist's "Leave-me-alone coalition" was incredibly energized. There are tactical gains to be had from boosting morale and energy on one's own side; and in a near-stalemate nobody can afford to leave tactical gains unexploited. But in order to rally the base in that way, the party has to step back from the center. (This is the primary mechanism at work in what I'll call TNR &c's see-saw thesis-- not endless stalemate, but constant and rapid overreaching by one side, leading the opposition to come to power, leading to overreaching by the opposition-- '92, '94, '96.)

More to come...

I have yet to see Chicago's two new daily "newspapers," the Tribune's Red Eye and the Sun-Times' Red Streak, both sound-bite tabloid-sized papers that aim to bring 18-34 year-olds into newspaper-reading habits. (For coverage, see here and here.) Neither seems to have made it onto Hyde Park streetcorners; I gather that the red boxes are all over the north side, and that the papers are being handed out for free to people who take the El (the El doesn't come to Hyde Park, and I live three-quarters of a mile from my office so I wouldn't take it anyways). So I can't really judge.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I'll judge. I find it depressing and almost-incomprehensible that I'm in the target market for these things. But I wouldn't have read them at 18 any more than I'll read them at 31; I probably wouldn't have read them at 15. During my adult life sometimes I've forgone the NYT for a quality regional broadsheet-- the Globe or the Tribune. I have no problem with people who read their quality regional broadsheet daily. But I've never even understood the use or appeal of the regular tabloids (Post, Daily News, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times.) It's not the format; I think there's a lot to be said for tabloid over broadsheet as way to physically present a newspaper. But I'm beyond snobbishness into sheer incomprehension on the content: why bother, except for sports coverage?

The Red papers are, from all accounts, worse. (One of them, after all, is for people for whom the Sun-Times is too challenging.) The alterna-press is different-- the Village Voice et. al. Of course if I'm looking for something young to do on a Saturday night I'm going to look in the Voice, not the Times (or local equivalents). But two-paragraph versions of a few of the day's leading stories? I can't see who would find that a good use of a quarter. I'm not predicting they'll fail, just saying that I won't understand it if they succeed...

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. The red boxes are now in Hyde Park; and there's a pile of Red Streaks in my building's lobby in the morning. I notice that the pile doesn't seem to get any smaller over the course of the day, which speaks well for my neighbors...

Kaus vs. Judis, Part II will be up later tonight, Part III likely not until tomorrow. In the meantime: NRO's Corner is getting fun in the run-up to the election; it now features a guest commentator from my hometown with whom I have a funny sort of political connection, Chip Griffin. TNR's &c is wielding a particularly nice stiletto today. Douglas Laycock has an excellent rebuttal to the nasty piece in the American Prospect about liberal law professors supporting Michael McConnell.

Election doubts on my part. Who is the responsible choice for Illinois Attorney General (the only major competitive race in the whoile state)? The fresh-out-of-law-school hack daughter of a hack who will protect Democratic machine politicians (such as the next governor as well as her father) from any serious legal scrutiny? Or the experienced prosecutor who has sent innocent people to death row and is still an ethusiast for Illinois' utterly broken death penalty process? I genuinely don't know what to do in this one; and that's a) unusual for me and b) frustrating when it's the only remotely relevant vote I might cast next week.

More later...

Kaus vs. Judis, Part 1:

My post below about the median voter theorem and Mickey Kaus' 50-50 article wasn't, quite, an endorsement of Kaus' general thesis, just an analysis of some things that tend to make it so and some things that tend to make it not so. Now I'm going to start to make things more complicated. I'll take as a point of comparsion the Judis-Teixeira thesis (much beloved by Josh Marshall) of emerging Democratic dominance based on Democrat-friendly demographic and cultural trends.

This will be a political-scientist-hat-on post, but there won't be anything very technical in it. Neither rational choice theory nor voting behavior is anywhere near my areas of research, which is good for you, the reader; it means that there will be neither greek letters nor regression analyses here. But I will make some reference to the conclusions that the greek-letter-people and the r-squared-people have drawn.

Now, the Downs' formal model of parties-as-firms competing for voters-as-consumers isn't the only thing one learns in Poli Sci 101. Another is an empirical finding that psychological identification with a party is a pretty durable thing, and that it endures across generations. (The most powerful predictor of party ID-- more than race, income, or education-- is parents' party ID.) Some insights from higher-level political science and rational choice theory: First, information is costly. Becoming a genuinely informed voter is a time-consuming and annoying activity. (Next week I vote in Chicago. My irrational commitment to casting informed votes is consuming a lot of my energy-- especially because here we engage in the deeply corrupt practice of electing judges, and there are a lot of them.) It becomes even more costly the more news coverage is oriented toward polls and scandals. Figuring out which candidate is marginally closer to my political views takes research. There's therefore a lot to be said for using the informational shorthand or brand-loyalty that is a political party, even though that loyalty will certainly sometimes lead me to vote for candidates who are farther away from my preferred positions.

A difficulty with rational-choice theories of voting that draw attention to the costliness of gathering information is that voting itself is costly, too-- and lacks benefits. For nearly all voters nearly all of the time, the cost of gas used in driving to and from the polling place, the marginal risk of a car accident en route, the loss of fifteen minutes or two hours of one's day add up to a cost that is vastly greater than (the likelihood of one's vote being decisive)x(the marginal benefit of one's preferred candidate winning). Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky (I'm slightly acquainted with Brennan, friendly-acquainted with Lomasky, and enormously impressed by them both, but have no institutional ties to either) have therefore argued that voting is an expressive activity, like rooting for a sports team, more than it is a calculated attempt to bring about the policies one prefers. Voting as expressive activity, in turn, further weakens the Downsian model, since it consists very substantially of loyalty to one's team. I don't shift my baseball loyalty from the Red Sox to the White Sox even when I move to Chicago. Why would I change party-team loyalty just because one candidate in one election was slightly closer to my preferred policy position?

Now teams-- and here I think I'm departing from Brennan and Lomasky's analysis-- needn't be parties. My primary loyalty could be to my union or my ethnic group, and so I could vote according with union or communtiy leaders' endorsements as a way of rooting for my team (my group) to do well. Or I could vote against the party that seems to be allied with the team I think of as the opposition.

For any of these reasons or some combination of them-- the costliness of information-gathering, the psychological character of party identification, the expressive character of voting, or the possibility of expressive voting out of loyalty to my team-that's-not-a-party-- there could be inefficiencies in the Downsian electoral market. Voters will be slow-- sometimes very slow-- to respond to shifts in parties' or candidates' positions. So even if parties are pretty pure vote-maximizing machines, even if the Karl Roves and Terry McAuliffes of the world really do define political parties, the Downsian equilibrium at the median voter might not happen very often. Instead, we'll see cycles of one-party dominance that change, sometimes quite suddenly, when the gap between the dominant party's positions and the median voter's positions has become too great. Then new loyalty will be built to the new dominant party, that will be similarly hard to shake. Things like this happen even in consumer markets to some degree. They're a lot more likely to happen in voting markets, where the incentive of consumer-voters to constantly correct and get things just right is vanishingly low.

Coming up later: part 2-- the parties-- and part 3-- the application of all this to the Kaus vs. Judis contest. (Things don't look quite as bleak for Kaus, or Downs, as it might seem so far.)

U.S. Says Russia Could Have Saved More Lives.

Y'know, for seven years now I've wanted the U.S. to speak up more vigorously about Chechnya. But of all the times to start, we pick the one where:
a) It wasn't the Russians committing a crime. Potentially gross incompetence and negligence to human life; but this time the Chechens really were terrorists and the Russians really weren't committing a war crime.
b) There's nothing to be done. I've wanted us to speak up on Chechnya in the hopes of changing something in the future-- like, say, convincing Russia to change its behavior in Chechnya. This just seems like carping and Monday-morning quarterbacking.
and c) There's an imminent Security Council vote that we care about a lot more than the Russians do, one for which we at least need Russia to refrain from vetoing.

So now we decide to make an issue? This one time, we might've just endorsed the call by the Russian liberals for an investigation and declined to push the issue further.

Question-- a sincere question. Did any diplomats from other states issue official comments on the events at Waco? If so, how did the U.S. respond to them? I don't remember any such; and the storming of the Branch Davidian compound lacked all of the justifications for gassing the Moscow theater. (No one inside was in imminent danger, for example.) My hunch is that any such diplomat would have gotten a very frosty reaction in Washington.

Today for the first time I've had more than 800 visitors to the site, more than 1000 page views. Two links from Instapundit and one from Kaus will do that...

Wow. Does this mean the Republicans are toast?

Mickey Kaus argues that we're in for a long-term 50-50 partisan stalemate, not because of who we are (the red state-blue state cultural divide story), but rather because of what the parties are-- vote-maximizing machines with the knowledge and the polls to constantly adjust to our center of gravity.

An exercise for everyone who took an introduction to political science course at some point: What's that called?
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That's right; it's Anthony Downs' 1957 Median Voter Theorem! In a competitive two-party system with a unidimensional political spectrum (and some other technical constraints) the parties will tend to converge around the preferences of the 50%+1th voter. They sometimes make mistakes in their estimation of those preferences (though increasingly-refined polling makes that less likely). They are sometimes beholden to a base for volunteer effort, money, and so on in a way that keeps them from migrating to the center. And sometimes the threat of a third-party split at the left or right margin can exercise a short-term pull on the appropriate party that needs to head off the threat. But, in general and over time, we'll just see fluctuation around the preferences of the median voter.

(A political scientist friend of mine has another friend who's an independent in one of those Reagan-Democrat Michigan counties that splits 50-50 most of the time. He uses this friend as a very reliable weathervane, and proudly tells his colleagues that he knows the median voter. It might seem that in 2000 the decisive voter was more likely to live in Florida, New Mexico, or New Hampshire; but appealing to the median voter in those places requires some local idiosyncrasies. The median voter in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, or Michigan is something more like the median voter in terms of ideological position. This has unfortunate consequences for trade policy. But I digress.)

Most of the conditions Kaus identifies as going on in politics right now could be understood as making this competitive political market (with voters as consumers and parties as firms) work more efficiently and elastically. The absurd heights to which polling, focus-group-testing, and micro-targeted vote appeals have risen are central. As important is his claim that unions and the Christian right have been weakened enough to allow each party to move to the center. I'm not sure he's right about that; remember the teacher's unions and vouchers. Also remember that the Greens are lurking out there on the Democrats' leftward flank, and the Libertarians-- while not right-wing in any general way-- often grab enough of the GOP's anti-tax and pro-gun base to tip House or Senate seats. And we've seen some evidence in the past few elections that one's base can simply get alienated and stay home on election day. So even now, neither party can simply lunge for the center, with no regard for what's happening among their most dedicated supporters.

Note that there are complications in our electoral system. The electoral college, the House, and the Senate might each have a pretty different median voter to appeal to (the Floridian Panhandler-- or do they not like that term?-- the Michigan Reagan Democrat union man and the Missouri soccer mom, respectively). And primaries are a very serious complication. Primaries with lots of candidates have bizarre scrambling effects on who the nomiee will be. Primaries with two or three often pull the nominating process toward the base in a way that makes the lunge for the center more difficult.

But as a general tendency over time, there's a great deal to be said for the Median Voter Theorem-- and Kaus is right that this political market has gotten a lot more efficient lately...

One more complication in mapping Downs' model onto the U.S. is that we don't live in a party-list system. We vote for candidates, not parties-- at least directly. That means that the race for the center will often happen at the level of the individual district-- hence, northeastern pro-choice Republicans and southern pro-gun Democrats. But actual governing happens, in important ways, by party-- most significantly, in control of the two houses of Congress. We lack a strong caucus-and-whip system, but virtually all members elected from one party can be counted on to support their caucus' choices for the chamber leadership (e.g. Speaker), and overall party makeup determines party makeup of the all-important committees. A schematic version of the politics of the mid-90s: the Republicans did a much better job than the Democrats of estimating where the median voters in the south and the Mountain states were. But the Republican caucus elected by appealing to those median voters had an overall position significantly to the right of the median voter nationally-- even though the median voter nationally preferred his or her hometown Republican to his or her hometown Democrat. The Republican House caucus thus became a juicy target for demonization by Clinton-Carville-Morris. District-by-district the Republicans faithfully represented the views of their constituents; and in the nation as a whole more people preferred their district's Republican. But a significant share of northerners and Californians who liked their own Republicans grew to detest the House Republican caucus as a whole, and so the Republicans kept losing PR battles even though they kept holding the House. Call this the Connie Morella problem. Remember that it's happened to the Democrats in other election cycles; indeed, it has something to do with the Democratic House wipeout of '94. And read my earlier post on what how complicated this makes things from the perspective of the individual voter: should I vote for the candidate who most accurately reflects my views? For the candidate whose party most accurately reflects my views, since my Representative or Senator will end up facilitating his or her party's control of the chamber? Or, most interestingly-- assuming local candidate convergence around the local median voter-- should I vote for the candidate whose party does not reflect my views, on the grounds that it's desirable to have a pro-choice segment of the GOP, a pro-gun segment of the Democratic Party, a caucus of pro-trade Democrats, a caucus of pro-gay Republicans, or whatever? (I think the answer is sometimes the last-- but it can involve serious short-term costs.) And this dilemma becomes most serious under conditions of a 50-50 split nationally-- because control of either chamber really could turn on my local election-- and local convergence around the local median voter.

UPDATE: See more above about Kaus' (and Downs') prediction, leading up to an analysis of it vs. John Judis' prediction of a new Democratic majority.

ANOTHER THOUGHT: This is an uncharacteristically goo-goo thing of me to say, but the Florida 2000/ Missouri 2000/ Florida 2002/ Torricelli-Lautenberg/ South Dakota vote fraud/ Minnesota absentee ballot/ etc/ etc problems make it tempting. A time when the parties are in near-perfect balance is as close as we get to a veil-of-ignorance situation for electoral laws. In other words, this-- or rather next January, once all of this year's election lawsuits end-- would be the perfect time to try to generate a model uniform election statute and get it adopted by the states. Election statutes are the quintessential case of rules that should be clearly enacted in advance, without knowing whom they will benefit, because interpretation of ambiguities in particular cases cannot plausibly be separated from the identity of the parties (in both senses). We don't know in advance which party is going to want to yank losing candidates off the ballot. We don't know in advance which party is going to have a Senator die a week before the election. Once the case arises, there are rampant doubts about those who interpret the rules-- the Florida, New Jersey, U.S. Supreme Courts. We've lately discovered all sorts of issues that arise in elections. What's really required to meet a residency requirement (or, in the case of Cheney-Texas-2000, a non-residency requirement)? On what date before an election does a ballot become irrevocably fixed? Should parties be able to yank their living nominees off the ballot? How does the need to get absentee ballots out in a timely fashion balance against the interest in having the Election Day election proceed? What is the right thing to do if polling places open late, or if they still have lines of voters come closing time?

These aren't questions about technology, though one could also add "what standards should apply in triggering recounts, and what standards should apply to the counting of ballots during those recounts?" Deciding them and fixing them isn't a matter of adopting touch-screen ballot booths, the goo-goos' favorite recommendation in early 2001; it's not a matter of passing this law. It's a matter of settling legal questions in advance. A few matters remain pretty clearly linked to partisan advantage: the Republicans have an interest in military ballots, the Democrats in felons' enfranchisement and in same-day registration. But a whole lot of disputed questions of electoral law could right now be treated as indeterminate with respect to who would be benefitted by which answer. The system would be benefitted by clarity, though. It's in everyone's interest that state and federal courts not have to step into a half-dozen elections per year. Let's get that bi- or multi-partisan commission rolling-- not another Ford-Carter or even Brookings-AEI group, but one made up of election-law and procedure specialists who know all the ways in which elections have gone wrong in the U.S., and that has the specific charge of reducing election-law ambiguities and suggesting a model uniform code that could keep elections out of the courts.