PolySigh

Textbook Costs

2009-11-25T22:02:00.003-05:00

Via Matt Yglesias, here's John Holbo on the high cost of academic books:

I hereby declare – for the benefit of anyone at Oxford UP who might be reading – that I was going to require my (probably 50-or-so) students next semester to buy your serviceable little paperback volumes: Woolhouse’s The Empiricists and Cottingham’s The Rationalists. I assigned them when I last taught History of Modern Philosophy, a few years back; and it worked out fine. But now that I see they cost $45 each, for a lousy sub-200 page, 7” x 5” paperback and pretty cheap paper. What’s that about? Do I really want my students to hate me? (Do I want to hate myself?) I am quite sure they were not this pricey a few years back. There is such a thing as charging too much, given that these books are not actually so good that they cause one’s head to explode with insight into the history of modern philosophy. So I am going to put these particular books on reserve in the library, and recommend them to my students as resources, but I am re-doing my syllabus in protest at absurd pricing. So there. Oxford UP has lost a course adoption – the holy grail of textbook publishing. Let that be a lesson to you.

Let me second his complaint with my own recent experience. Next semester I'll be teaching political parties and elections for the first time in nearly five years. I usually begin the course with Anthony Downs's, An Economic Theory of Democracy, a political science classic. Yet Pearson Publishing wants $86.67 for the book. Amazon is offering it for about $60, but that's still way too expensive for a paperback. Plus, it shows that that Pearson is already marking it up by $25 or 40% for those, like college bookstores, who buy directly from them. The book has been in print since 1957, so I'm assuming that Pearson has made its money back and then some decades ago. I strongly doubt that Pearson needs to charge $60, let alone $86, to cover printing costs along with a reasonable profit. As with Holbo, I can't in good conscience require my students to pay this much for just one book.

Danger! Beware of Falling Names

2009-11-25T08:54:00.001-05:00

Eric Alterman shows new levels of humility:

I took a seminar at Yale in 1985 when I was getting my master's with Edward Said on the role of the intellectual. Everyone in the class wore black and quoted Derrida (with whom I also took a seminar, in French, of which I understood very little). Anyway, there was a rather imposing African-American fellow at the seminar table on the first day with a vest and tie, etc., and a big afro. He said nothing for the two-hour class and then at the end, was called and ripped into Said with every three-dollar word I had ever heard and many more I had not. It was like a fantasy come true--going back to school to show off how smart you were now; perhaps the coolest moment I've ever seen in a classroom. Then Said said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Cornel West," who apparently was an assistant professor in the Divinity School, letting the rest of us in on the joke. The amazingest thing about Cornel is what an original he is; there's never been anything like him: "Gramsci and Sly Stone both understood..."

California Politics

2009-11-15T18:04:00.003-05:00

The Rose Institute offers a good overview of California congressional races. The post nicely summarizes the statewide setting following the withdrawal of Gavin Newsom from the gubernatorial race last week:

Jerry Brown will likely be the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, and incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer will be the nominee for Senate. While both Brown and Boxer may run strong campaigns, neither one will create the excitement that Obama created in 2008 that helped Democrat congressional candidates down the ballot. Republican incumbents who had close elections in 2008 because of Obama will likely face a more favorable climate in 2010.

In a forthcoming issue of The Forum, I have a review of Seth Masket's excellent No Middle Ground: How Information Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures. A recent article in The Sacramento Bee tends to confirm Masket's analysis:

On average, individual Democrats in the California Legislature voted with the majority of their party or abstained 99 times out of 100 this session. Republicans, on average, voted with the majority of their party or abstained 96 out of every 100 times. "California is by far the most polarized state legislature" in the nation, said professor Boris Shor, with the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, who recently published a study on the ideological composition of legislatures. "California makes the U.S. Congress look like tiddlywinks."

An analysis in the Los Angeles Times describes the geography of state polarization:

There is a yawning gulf between the left-leaning coastal regions that feed California's stereotype and the right-leaning inland areas that seem firmly planted in Middle America rather than the land of the Beach Boys.

Demographically, the poll demonstrated, the two populations are distinct.

Inland voters are far more likely to be religious. Almost half were Protestant -- a reflection of the strong evangelical movement -- though that was true of only three in 10 coastal voters. Church attendance, which political analysts see as a key indicator of political behavior -- the more often one attends services, the more reliably conservative the vote -- was also different. In inland areas, almost four in 10 voters said they went to services at least once a week, while three in 10 coastal voters made that claim.

Inland voters were older, more conservative and more likely to be married and white than coastal voters. Interestingly, location seemed at times to trump race or gender. Latino voters who live in the area espoused more conservative views than their coastal brethren. Two-thirds of coastal Latinos were registered Democrats; fewer than half of inland Latinos were. One third of coastal Latinos described themselves as "liberal," twice the proportion of inland Latinos.

President Obama Should Refuse the Nobel Prize

2009-10-09T09:08:00.003-04:00

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is likely to be more of a headache to President Obama than an honor. It reinforces the perception, held among many, that he is philosophically more European than American. And it's not hard to imagine the reaction should he decide to increase troop levels in Afghanistan - "Some advocate for peace!"

As a result, President Obama should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize. He should simply say, "I am honored and humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of others who are far more deserving than I am." By doing so, he would reap the benefits (in terms of world opinion) of having been chosen for the award, but stymie critics by acting honorably and with humility and grace.

The Scots-Irish

2009-10-06T15:07:00.003-04:00

An excellent analysis of the Scots-Irish vote by Cameron Joseph at The Atlantic:

The populist fury aimed at President Obama and his fellow Democrats may have roots much deeper than health care. In fact, it may be that it can be traced back to the emigration of the Scots-Irish, the first white group to settle interior America.They've been called rednecks, hillbillies and crackers. In the modern parlance of political correctness, they've been referred to as the Bubba vote. They live in Sarah Palin's "real America," and they make up the majority of Reagan Democrats. They count as distant relatives at least twelve U.S. presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and even to Barack Obama, yet the Scots-Irish remain largely ignored as an ethnic group in America.

A Bleg on Technology and Teaching

2009-08-09T10:34:00.003-04:00

I'm giving a talk at APSA about the classroom use of Internet resouces, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You are all cordially invited:

http://www.signup4.net/Public/ap.aspx?EID=MORT69E

Right now I would be grateful for any thoughts on how you use the Internet. What are your favorite sites? What online interactive resources do you find most helpful? How do you teach students the research uses of the Internet?

Gallup on Ideology

2009-07-07T20:12:00.003-04:00

Cross-posted from Epic Journey:

New Gallup data suggest that it is an oversimplification to speak of a rightward or leftward shift in public opinion:

Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.
...

Given the stark differences between the current political scene and the one surrounding the 2004 elections, 2004 represents a good comparison point for this analysis. Not only was there a five-point drop between 2004 and 2008 (from 51% to 46%) in the popular vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but there has been a similar drop (from 45% in 2004 to 40% in 2008 and 39% in 2009) in the percentage affiliating themselves with the Republican Party.

Have Americans' positions on major cultural, social, and policy issues shifted left accordingly? A broad review of the available trends suggests not. However, they have not shifted solidly right either, countering Americans' claims in the new poll that they have grown more conservative.

Continuity of Government

2009-07-03T10:15:00.003-04:00

Here is a followup to the previous post on the problem of having an elderly senator in the line of succession. The Continuity of Government Commission just issued another report:

The current constitutional and legal provisions fail to take into account the possibility of a catastrophic attack on Washington, D.C. Since all individuals included in the Presidential line of succession are based in our nation’s capital, a catastrophic attack on the city could potentially kill or incapacitate many if not all of these individuals and cause significant confusion about who can assume the powers of the presidency. With the inclusion of members of Congress and acting cabinet secretaries in the line of succession, all of whom must resign from their current positions before assuming the presidency and can then be “bumped” from the presidency by an individual ranking higher in the line of succession, it is possible to have no one remaining in the line of auccession. Current procedures leave our nation especially vulnerable at presidential inaugurations and State of the Union Addresses.

Presidential Succession and the President Pro Tem

2009-06-17T15:21:00.002-04:00

Writing in Roll Call, Eric Ueland proposes fixing a problem in presidential succession. Under current law, the president pro tem of the Senate in line after the vice president and speaker of the House. By custom, the senior member of the majority party is the president pro tem, meaning that someone high in the line of succession is likely to be very elderly. (The post currently belongs to Robert Byrd. ) Ueland, a former Senate aide and vice president of the Duberstein Group, says that the Senate should simply give the job to the majority leader.

This worthy idea actually orginated with Professor R. Lawrence Butler of Rowan University. On October 17, 2001, he wrote in The Hill:

The majority leader is the Senate's closest parallel to the Speaker of the House in that he is responsible for managing the Senate schedule and serves as the chief spokesperson and legislative tactician for his party caucus.
...
In a time of crisis, it is vital that our leaders have both the political legitimacy and the leadership ability needed to soothe an anxious public. All other posts in the line of succession have some claim to a broad electoral mandate. The entire House chooses the Speaker; Cabinet secretaries are appointed by a nationally elected president and confirmed by the entire Senate. The president pro tem's sole claim to the office is the willingness of the voters in a single state to keep sending him back to Washington decade after decade.

Would the sight of an aging senator taking the presidential oath of office be of particular comfort to a country rocked by the death of its three top political leaders? The times demand that we make a wiser choice.

Obama and a "Joke"

2009-05-10T11:10:00.002-04:00

Last night, President Obama laughed as a "comedian" wished for the death of one of his political opponents:

Rush Limbaugh once attacked me by name. I have recently criticized him. But as a kidney donor, I find Sykes's line -- and President Obama's reaction -- to be utterly contemptible.

Campaign Promises and Presidential Realities

2009-04-25T09:26:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted from Epic Journey.

On January 19, 2008, Senator Barack Obama issued this statement:

Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Yesterday was Armenian Remembrance Day. PolitiFact.com reports:

Obama did issue the statement on the 24th, in which he described the "heavy weight" of history and the "terrible events of 1915," adding "I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed."But he did not use the word "genocide." ... Obama's April 24th statement still doesn't meet the terms of his promise, and the Obameter stays at Promise Broken.

AP reports: "In breaking that promise Friday, the president did the same diplomatic tiptoeing he criticized the Bush administration for doing."

Mike Pence: Billy Graham Abets Tyrants

2009-04-22T16:28:00.002-04:00

Here's a video of the exchange between Mike Pence (R-IN) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In it, Pence criticizes President Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, claiming that the greeting undermined support for U.S. values. As an example, Pence quoted Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist:

[W]e could never fully prepare ourselves for the disappointment that came from seeing the free world abandon its own values.

About whom was Sharansky speaking about?

"An example was the trip of the world-famous evangelical preacher, Billy Graham, to the Soviet Union in 1984," write Sharansky. During the trip, Graham was asked about religious freedom in the Soviet Union and he responded, "You have some problems with religion, the United States has some problems with religion." According to Sharansky, "Sitting in my prison cell . . . I was dumbfounded. How could Graham possibly place religious freedom in a free society like the United States on par with religious freedom in a fear society like the Soviet Union?"

There you have it, Billy Graham and Barack Obama are both the cats-paw of dictatorships.

Donkey Basketball

2009-04-18T17:44:00.003-04:00

The NYT has a story today on donkey basketball. For those of you not familiar with this particular activity, it's, as you can imagine, a variant of basketball with the players mounted on donkeys. Animal rights groups are complaining that donkey basketball is cruel to the animals. This comment from PETA stuck out:

“Donkeys have no place in a gym,” said Kristie Phelps, a PETA spokeswoman. “They are very easily confused, and they have no idea what’s going on.”

Well, Ms. Phelps, meet Scraps.

2-Year-Old Donkey Called Up To Pro Donkey Basketball League

Research on the 2008 Election

2009-04-18T13:58:00.003-04:00

(Cross-posted from Epic Journey)

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has some findings that cast light on politics in 2008 and beyond:

Among the entire population the Internet is now equal to newspapers and roughly twice as important as radio as a source of election news and information.
Voters are moving away from news sites with no point of view, and towards sites that match their own political viewpoints.
Due to demographic differences, McCain voters were more likely than Obama voters to use the Internet. But online Obama supporters were generally more engaged in the online political process and were more likely to post original content, share content with others, sign up for updates , give money to a candidate online, set up news alerts and sign up online for campaign activities.
Perhaps most relevant for those planning 2010 campaigns is the following: 83 percent of those age 18-24 have a social networking profile, and two-thirds of young profile owners took part in political activity on these sites in 2008.

In Epic Journey, we place a good deal of emphasis on the rules of the nomination process. In a recent paper at the annual meeting of Midwest Political Science Association, Caitlyn Dwyer confirms the crucial role of the rules. Specifically, she finds that Obama won under proportional representation, Clinton would have been leading in delegates under a winner-take-all system. On the Republican side, conversely, Romney would have been leading in delegates if the Republican Party had used proportional representation.

Politics and Autism Awareness

2009-04-02T19:50:00.003-04:00

Today, April 2, is World Autism Awareness Day.

The issue of autism recently touched our profession in a tragic way. Professor Gertrude Steuernagel of Kent State's Department of Political Science was one of the very few scholars studying public policy on autism. In early February, she died from injuries that she suffered in a beating in her home in late January. Her 18-year old son, who has low-functioning autism, is under arrest for the murder and has pleaded not guilty.

I never met Trudy, but for years we had a friendly e-mail correspondence stemming from our shared experience as the parents of autistic kids and our interest in autism policy.

It would compound the tragedy of Trudy's death if it led to the impression that autistic people are violent. Actually, the data show that serious crime is rare among people with such disorders.

Congressional Simulation

2009-03-31T22:17:00.003-04:00

Those of you who teach Congress courses may have some interest in the legislative simulation we have under way right now in Claremont. The main page is http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/govt/jpitney/sim09.htm

Students in my politics of journalism class are covering it with text, video, the works. The blog is at http://claremontbeat.blogspot.com/ They are even Twittering at: http://twitter.com/ClaremontBeat
And they have a YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ClaremontBeatTV

An example:

New Research on 2008 Nomination Politics

2009-03-31T17:50:00.001-04:00

Cross-posted from Epic Journey:

A new report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examines the polls that falsely indicated that Barack Obama would win the New Hampshire primary. It concludes:

Given the compressed caucus and primary calendar, polls conducted before the New Hampshire primary may have ended too early to capture late shifts in the electorate’s preferences there.
Most commercial polling firms conducted interviews on the first or second call, but respondents who required more effort to contact were more likely to support Senator Clinton. Instead of continuing to call their initial samples to reach these hard‐to‐contact people, pollsters typically added new households to the sample, skewing the results toward the opinions of those who were easy to reach on the phone, and who more typically supported Senator Obama.
Non‐response patterns, identified by comparing characteristics of the pre‐election samples with the exit poll samples, suggest that some groups who supported Senator Clinton—uch as union members and those with less education—ere under‐ represented in pre‐election polls, possibly because they were more difficult to reach.
Variations in likely voter models could explain some of the estimation problems in individual polls. Application of the Gallup likely voter model, for example, produced a larger error than was present in the unadjusted data.

A new experimental study finds:

After Clinton's concession in June 2008, Democrats were more generous toward supporters of their own preferred candidate than to supporters of the other Democratic candidate. The bias observed in June persisted into August, and disappeared only in early September after the Democratic National Convention. We also observe a strong gender effect, with bias both appearing and subsiding among men only

Turnout

2009-03-30T09:50:00.001-04:00

(Cross-posted from Epic Journey)

In California, the 2008 campaign does not seem to have left a legacy of civic engagement. From the LA Times:

Voters streamed to the polls in November, lining up from before dawn until after nightfall, a tableau of involvement that cheered fans of democracy whether or not they supported the winners.In California, almost 80% of registered voters turned out, the highest percentage in 32 years. In Los Angeles, almost 83%. If not as dramatic as Iraqi citizens confirming their rights with ink-stained fingers, it was enough to suggest heightened interest in things political.Not so fast. Last week in parts of Los Angeles, voters were called to the polls once again, to elect a state Senate replacement for Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Democrat who had moved to the county Board of Supervisors. Little more than 6% showed up.It was not an anomaly: When the area's first post-presidential election, the Los Angeles mayor's race, was contested earlier this month, a muted 17% of the city's registered voters turned out ...

Robert Cole was the director of Obama's get-out-the-vote effort among African Americans in California, which succeeded dramatically. Last Tuesday, he was the third-place finisher among Democrats in the state Senate race. Rather than inspire heightened turnout, he said, Obama's campaign appeared to have left many voters burned out. "They felt they had performed their civic duty by voting for Barack Obama for president," he said.

Pasadena also had low turnout.

(More from the very useful Election Administration Research Center at Berkeley.)

Blue Orange?

2009-03-14T10:15:00.003-04:00

(Cross posted from Epic Journey)

Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, may be on the cusp of political upheaval. In the Orange County Register, Dena Bunis reports:

Orange County Democrats have become so emboldened by how well President Barack Obama did here on election night that as far as they're concerned they can compete for any seat in this Republican rich environment. Case in point: Irvine Councilwoman and former Mayor Beth Krom. She made it official this week that she is going to take on Republican Rep. John Campbell.

Outside of Southern California, Orange County is synonymous with wealth, glamour (e.g., The OC) and conservative politics. The reality is more complicated. Republicans have generally won there, but in 2008, McCain took the county by a slim 50-48 percent margin. What's up?

First, it's now a majority-minority county, about 33 percent Hispanic, 16 percent Asian, and 2 percent African American.
Second, while coastal areas are indeed as affluent as the stereotype holds, there are gritty working-class areas farther inland. (I used to live in one of them.)
Third, it is home to large numbers of high-income professionals, who liked Obama. Nationwide, he won narrowly among voters making more than $200k a year, and by a 58-40 percent margin among those with postgraduate study. As Michael Barone has argued convincingly, The GOP cannot take upscale voters for granted.

Orange County Republicans will have to work hard to keep their turf from turning blue.

Devine Judgment

2009-03-13T17:27:00.005-04:00

At Exacting Editor, Don Devine, the political scientist who had a controversial tenure as head of the Office of Personnel Managment under President Reagan, offers some surprisingly critical reflections on the Bush administration:

"[Bush people] they managed the government by getting political people who would follow the Bush line -- which might seem to be what I'm saying. The difference was the absence of a coherent philosophy."
The main lesson[of Iraq] is one that George W. Bush originally said himself: You can't `nation-build.' That's number one. Number two, you should be careful getting in. No matter how weak the opposition looks, they're a lot stronger once you are dealing with them [on the ground].
When editor Frank Gregorsky asked who was the better president, Bush or Clinton, Devine said: "Bill Clinton."

California Ballot Trick

2009-03-03T16:00:00.003-05:00

Here are five words I never thought I'd write: I agree with George Lakoff.

In the aftermath of the California's budget crisis, the legislature put a spending cap on a special-election ballot. But the ballot summary leaves out a crucial detail: the measure would extend the tax increases in this year's budget deal. Instead of making a straightforward case for additional revenues, the legislators are trying to get their way by slight of hand. As Lakoff says, "the language prejudices voters towards passage of the proposition and toward the political and economic views of the proponents of the proposition."

Live From New York, It's Minority Status

2009-02-16T13:27:00.004-05:00

This Saturday Night Live sketch is not especially funny (the writers sorely miss President Bush), but the first couple of minutes nicely explain one political advantage belonging to an out-party that is in the minority in the House. Bill Connelly and I discuss this strategic posture in a recent Forum article. (h/t to David Franzel)

An Ironic Tom Daschle Ad

2009-02-03T01:35:00.000-05:00

From 1986:

I Can't Wait!

2009-01-26T15:54:00.001-05:00

Just got this email today:

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Save $10.00, just $24.99 plus shipping and handling, by pre-ordering this memorable book today -- be proud to share it with your friends and family!

Headline of the Day

2009-01-22T09:20:00.001-05:00

From the Daily Mail:

Former French President Chirac hospitalised after mauling by his clinically depressed poodle