What Did Speckie Do?

In our reading we have been examining the arguments presented by Morris Fiorina, and comparing it to the one presented by Thomas Frank in his book, 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' The central theme of the discussion is Fiorina asserts that the major points of contention in American politics are socially rooted and not economic. This contrasts sharply with Frank's book, because frank examines the takeover of the south by the republican party, and asserts that the economically challenged farmers were duped by the GOP's stance on social issues and subsequently convinced into voting for a party that would be against their economic interest. As we can see here, these two authors disagree at a fundamental level what politics stems from. this is not by any means a complete summary of the two arguments - as you can imagine they are far more detailed. Since this week's incarnation of class focuses more on Fiorina, he will get the attention.

With regard to Arlen Specter I think his party hopping implies that elites are not as polarized as we had once thought but are primarily focused with getting re-elected. Fiorina would say that Specter and his constituents are so rooted in their social ideals that they see a shift in the way that the parties define themselves, justifying the jump. Aldrich would say that the policy plans of the democrats made the switch more viable because it made economic sense to the median voter in Specter's district. In the end i think that this kind of activity really is an outlier and that the reality is that the parties are very polarized. In addition, ifthe parties were not then we might see more switches? who can say? I am just postulating

What's the matter with you, America?

This week we have read a discussion on the subject of an argument presented by Thomas Frank, who asserts midwestern poor farmers have been "tricked" by the Republican party to vote against their economic interest. He argues that the policies that republicans enact favor the rich and not the poor and middle class. The so-called "fooled" voters support, however primarily because of the Republican's campaign on morals and family values. in effect they create a populist appeal while actually putting into place elite favoring policy. Frank calls this the "backlash" effect. there is a greater impact of the backlash effect. it represents a "partisan dealignment" which is in effect when voters break rank with what their economic interests and create an inconsistency with the indicators we use to determine partisan preference. Bartels, another author argues that this is wrong, and that frank is guilty of what could be effectively considered to be sampling bias, and that he is in actuality measuring activists, rather than the actual public opinion. Bartels claims that southerners who are typically poor have become more republican and are thus accounting for the partisan spread.

I personally think that Bartels is wrong. I think that conservatives have done very well in the "bible belt: and that it is a relatively poor area. also when we examine local governments, I believe that the partisan dealignment manifests itself best there. all over the midwest even in our state here, we see many local governments in the more rural and less affluent counties and communities lean more to the right. as Tip O'Neil said "all politics is local" and if we want to measure a substantive partisan shift it would be best expressed across the full stratification of government - national voting rates, state, county and municipal.

Planning A Party? Where is my Invite?

If one of the major parties were to fall, it would present a very interesting set of opportunities for a new parties to rise. for one thing the remaining party would become the center, leaving it open to re-definition by the new party. we define our parties primarily in relation to each other, so some swift political maneuvering would allow the new party to knock the old one around in how it defines itself. Another option is to create a new party with similar stances on some of the issues as the remaining party. Doing this would cause the old issue set that the two previous parties used to distinguish eachother, and raise new topics to re-define the parties, thus forcing political progress, and a mashup of the political scene. This would probably be most easily done by creating a party based on the "moderate" stance before the fall o the previous party. this would give rise to let representatives who are more moderate from the remaining party to jump ship. if the new party seems to rise and do well in your area, the wise politician would jump ship in order to stay in office. as far as who i would choose for my leadership, it would depend on the party that fell. In a way it may be easier to choose new leaders who can establish themselves as "moderates" rather than have to contend with a long history, and peoples preconcieved notions about the candidates. the voting blocs and electorate would be the ones supporting the moderates. I call this whole process "stealing the middle" it allows the rising party to appeal the the previous extreme without having to follow the old failed agenda. a plan like this would expect high electoral success and the capacity to knock the old party around and cause it to reshape. this could leave the doors to the white house open very rapidly.

A bit of perspective

I thought this was profound. We focus a lot on what is happening here, it is interesting to see what is happening abroad. This video, if not downright shocking is interesting to say the least. I am suprised at the manner Hannan addresses Brown with, and more astounded with the numbers he lists off.

Party ID ... leave it at the exit poll

The 2008 congressional election was candidate centric not party centric because of low congressional approval during the voting week. you ccan find this info here and here. the week of the vote, congressional approval was between 17 and 21 % yet members were elected by large margins. if we look at our own data, from wisconsin it might help narrow things down a bit. I can't find any data regarding congressional approval from WI, but i can look at the voting data for our congresspeople. remember the national approval of congress is pretty stinkin low. the winning percentages however are pretty high the lowest win percentage is 54% - you can see the representatives vote percentages here. Why is this? why are the approval ratings ranging from the mid 50 to the high 70's if the congressional approval is low? in 7 of the 8 districts that we have here, the incumbents won. the 8th district had no incumbent. this bucks the trend that was displayed by a democratic takeover of congress, because the seats didnt change, even though we all thought congress was doing a pretty craptacular job! how can this be? I think that we have to separate the congressional races from congress as a whole. when people vote in congressional races, the focus is on the candidates, not the entire body. gerrymandering aside, if the district voters vote sincerely, and they feel their particular congressperson is doing a good job, then there would be little cause to change the rep. hence the incumbency advantage. but if this is the case, and people do get frustrated with congress as a whole, why do we see national shifts in party majorities? are some voters different than others? do some take their frustration with the majority party out on their congressional rep? that's not very nice. how can we explain this duality? i find this interesting, however unsolved by my data. I will muse on this more and update this.

I'll out minority you ... oh wait this is congressional politics, not grad admissions

... too far? there's no limit to sarcasm ... anyhoo

This week's installment:
"Focusing on the US Congress, what is the role of a minority party in a democracy? In particular, you might consider trying your hand at an explaining the seemingly unending calls for bipartisanship from certain corners of the chattering class OR consider why 214 of the Republicans even bother to show up to work every week since they can't really stop the legislative juggernaut that is the Democratic coalition."

I think that the role of a minority party in a democracy, very simply, is to prevent tyranny from a majority party. Afterall, just because a party is in a majority does not mean that it represents the entirety of the country. Furthermore a minority party can be expected to generally be a voice of comparable "reason" to provide opposition to the majority party. one reason, if any is that the majorities in congress have always been narrow meaning that for a majority to rule uncontrolled would mean to alienate half of the country. furthermore, should we look at the structure of congress, we have to realize that congress is not a majoritarian body, but in effect a super majoritarian body of sorts, because of the senate. the senate needs a supermajority of votes in favor to pass a bill, while the house only needs simple majority. because a bill has to pass both the house and the senate the bill needs to reach a supermajority to pass. a minority party can still block a bill by preventing the supermajority vote in the senate. that's where the calls for bipartisanship come from, that;s why the republicans bother showing up to work.

Finally! a simpler set of questions! a shorter blog! holy crap!

Doc

I will admit I am a HUGE fan of Battlestar Galactica and since we are talking about presidential campaigns and candidates and their paraphernalia i though i would contribute these nice pictures to the mix.

Happy

Also ... Tip O'Neil has one of the funniest smiles in congress. (it was brought up in my Congressional Politics lecture today)

Dopey

I think the word "lumpy" sounds funny.

also, I found this and i thought it was entertaining so i thought i would share it ...

Campaign tastes like Champagne ... When you Win

This week we are discussing campaigns, in particular the 2008 election. We will answer and discuss such intriguing questions as:

• Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential elections seem like agents of their parties?
• Were they constrained by their netroots (and was this different than being constrained by the electorate)?
• how has the balance between candidate centeredness and party-centric campaigns been affected by recent technological innovations and advances in communication?
• with so much attention focused on the recent string of close presidential contests in the readings, where do congressional candidates stand with respect to vulnerability posed by the internet

So I'm sure most of you readers (all 2 ... maybe 3 of you ... maybe I'm having delusions of grandeur at this point) are probably getting kind of sick of my rigid structuring of these insufferably boring posts around these questions, but hey I'm not here to make you happy, or to be consistently gramatically correct. I'm getting graded on this crap so it ends up being closer to a paper and i am sorry. I will try and keep this somewhat interesting but in case i don't, well ... it kind of sucks to be you ...

anyhoo ... on to this week's assignment

Did the candidates of the 2008 presidential election seem like agents of their parties? well, what does it mean to be a agent of a party? furthermore what would we call a candidate who is not an agent of the party?
I think that we can define a candidate who is an agent of a party as a candidate who centers the party line in their campaign. A candidate who does not do this, is said to run a candidate centric campaign. I think if we examine both nominated candidates as well as the non-nominated ones, we can see that they all play to the party line before the party primary in order to win the nomination. because of this, I would contend we should throw this part of the campaign out from our examination of party agency amongst candidates, because all of the candidates act like party agents to win the nomination, including this would make us guilty of a sampling bias were we to try and draw any graphs on this data. ( in addition ... i know i cutting out a lot of the candidates, but that's the point ... i'm being lazy and this is a BLOG!!!!!)

In one corner of the ring we have junior Sentator from Illinois, the democratic party nominee ... Barack Obama! His post nomination campaign is regarded pretty middle of the road his stances on issues such as socialized health care withdrawing from the war in Iraq, and economic reform are pretty close to the democratic party line stance on these issues.

Annnnnd in the other corner we have Senator John McCain from Arizona. Weighing in with 19 years of expierence as of 2006, the Republican heavyweight ran a campaign where he called himself a "maverick". McCain provides us with what is quite possibly the greatest example of what a candidate centered campaign looks like.

DING! DING!

Round 1: Campaign Slogans
Campaign slogans in my opinion are really the simplest way to figure out what the campaigns are really all about because they by their nature take what a candidate is all about and distill it down to a modicum of words. perhaps from thi we can gain some insight into the nature of the campaigns. Let us examine:

• Obama: "Hope" or "Change" or "Change we can believe in"
• McCain: "Country first" or "A Leader we can believe in" (suprisingly hard to find!!!! damn you interwebs!)

Ok, so we can pretty clearly see that McCain and Obama's slogans are somewhat similar, but also pretty different. McCain's slogans clearly emphasize himself more than Obama's do. From this early step, we can see already a big difference between between the types of campaign. McCain's campaign message is more focused on him than Obama's. Im calling it for this round: McCain is the more candidate centered of the two.

DING!

Round 2: Technology

This is where things start to get a little bloody ... we are going to compare the use of technology and the impact of technology on both of our competitiors.
I found an article in the British tabloid the telegraph that looks at the way technology impacted both of the candidates. You can see it here.

• Obama: technological impacts aside, Obama is definitely the contender with the greater understanding of technology. He was seen all over his campaign touting his handy-dandy crack, err blackberry.
• McCain: Definitely had a weak spot here ... he kind of proverbiably shot himself in the foot when he said he doesn't use the internet.

DING! Match over. short, i know, but well im running out of time, and lets face it, as if Feb. 25th 2009 we all know who won the campaign.

Some Final Thoughts

One Impact we can examine is how the internet affected the campaigns with regard to their candidate centeredness or party centricity. I think that the internet has definitely made campaigns more about the candidates because it provides a greater access to individual voters about the candidates. in addition to that, i think that an individual is much easier to sell to the average person than a party is, which further impacts the effects of the internet.

Beyond this I think that Obama definitely had the upper hand with technology - his campaign hit the internet early and hard with a "grassroots" style of fundraising, much of it done over the internet. McCain did not do so so much. as far as the impact of the internet on both campaigns and candidates, it's hard to honestly say how much it helped or hurt either candidate because anyone can put whatever they like on the web, regardless of it's credibility or certifiablilty.

Lastly I think that the advent of communications technology has really affected candidates in the area of vulnerability - on the web anyone can smear a candidate and more people that see the smear and it can cause more damage. as a result the internet has made candidates more vulnerable.

Super Amazing Fun Module 3 Blog Posting, a.k.a. Nominations, Campaigns and Elections, oh my!

This week we the brave, daring and intrepid poli. sci. students are tasked with blogging about election rules and factions. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us is of course Federalist No. 10, triggered by that notorious word: faction. After being proverbially clubbed over the head with this wonderfully crafted and reasoned piece of text, I've developed a nearly Pavlovian response to that word. ok maybe im being a little melodramatic and straying from the topic at hand - but that text clearly is incredibly important and relevant to the topic at hand and to the field we are studying in general. And for good reason.

Gah! I'm straying from the topic again. Ok, so our assignment has given many questions to answer. to quote our assignment directly "the text suggests that primaries were implemented to 'diminish the influence of political organizations on political life.' have unintended consequences been produced by new rules? what about complexities in the ways in which different electoral institutions hav been grafted together?" Whoa. These are some loaded questions. There are however more ...
"Compare nominations to campaign finance reform. How might the current campaign finance regulatory regime affect partisanship?" (jeez. what is the current campaign finance regulatory regime anyway?) "do efforts to reform elections through primaries and the regulation of money in elections work at cross-purposes? consider both sides of this question. Finally, are these goals even realistic? Can the influence of (all) factions be purged from American elections? And if we could do this, would we want to?" Yowza. ok if we are going to successfully tackle this assignment we need to break down these questions, and answer them in a rather boring but straightforward way. you know it, i love it: it's the point-by-point.

1. Have unintended consequences been produced by new rules (because of primaries)? 1a. What about complexities in the ways in which different electoral institutions have been grafted together?
Ok, to answer this we have to look at the basic structure of primaries. from the video lecture we learned that there are three commonly used methods of conducting a primary: caucuses, party conventions and direct primaries. The different methods have different effects on primary turnouts, but im a little unclear if this is really the question that we are to answer. I think what we are really trying to get at is what is the impact of primaries in general on the political institutions of our country. For starters, they are not governed by the government, but by the parties - the parties can re-structure them however they like. wow that's kind of a big impact! we have a step in selecting our law makers that itself is not governed by law.
How can this be? Primaries in most states are required by law (I think). Beyond this, I don't think that the states say very much. Sure, they (the states) have laws that have requirements for having enough signatures to form parties on things like which parties can hold primaries, but they don't really go beyond that. In other words states don't dictate party rules for who can be a member of a party or how those parties can chose to chose their candidates beyond a very basic threshold. What I find interesting about all of this is that there is a big part of the election system that is not under heavy legal guidance. We willingly let the parties choose who the want and then elect our political leaders as a consequence of their choices.
Ok, so that leaves us with the question: What are some of the consequences of primaries? well for starters, we effectively mandate that parties have to be an inherent part of the electoral process ( at least for federal systems). One consequence of this is that we begin to limit ourselves to very few large, rich and powerful parties instead of smaller ones. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons that we have had 2 major parties for so long. Another consequence is that this limits the number and variety of candidates that we can have for any position.

2. How might the current campaign finance regulatory regime affect partisanship?
To answer this question, we should first look at what the current campaign finance regulatory regime is. Under the Federal Election Commission (FEC) the spending and funding of candidates is closely monitored. The most recent legislation on campaign financing is the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), otherwise known as the McCain/Feingold Campaign finance reform law. To quote Wikipedia in all of its questionableness:
"The BCRA was a mixed bag for those who wanted to remove the money from politics. It eliminated all soft money donations to the national party committees, but it also doubled the contribution limit of hard money, from $1,000 to $2,000 per election cycle, with a built-in increase for inflation. In addition, the bill aimed to curtail ads by non-party organizations by banning the use of corporate or union money to pay for "electioneering communications," a term defined as broadcast advertising that identifies a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or nominating convention, or 60 days of a general election." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform
So, what does this mean for partisanship? It means a few things. First, it limits where candidates and parties can get their funding by setting a maximum donation amount per person. A result of this is that parties and candidates have to appeal to more people to get more donations. This in turn leads us down the road of two possible outcomes, and two possible impacts for partisanship. Candidates and parties could end up going the "big tent" route and attempt to broaden their appeal to many people. This is not uncommon and it tends to result in very moderate parties and candidates. On the other hand we have also seen in some elections the exact opposite. Sometimes candidates and local parties will run a very partisan hand, especially in districts where they are very popular. By doing this, they play to the more hard-core end of their base and will try to get "more of their people donating and voting than the other guy". The results of this are very high partisanship.

3. Do efforts to reform elections through primaries and the regulation of money in elections work at cross-purposes? I'm not sure what cross-purposes means, however I think that primaries and finance regulations in the end have the net effect of really pushing candidates to perform well. I also think that campaign finance reform and primaries can work against eachother. Primaries generally push candidates to be more partisan and to stick closer to the party line. This contrasts pretty harshly with the mediating effects of campaign finance reform which practically forces candidates to behave more moderately. This seems like a non-answer but I think that the results can both be collusive and contradictory, because they are not mutually exclusive.

4. Finally, are these goals even realistic? 4a. Can the influence of (all) factions be purged from American elections? 4b. And if we could do this, would we want to?
The short answer: No, not realistic; No, an influence free election isnt possible; and No, we wouldnt want that even if we could.
The long answer: No the goal of having an influence free election isnt realistic, however the goal of reducing the amount of impact that influence groups have on elections is. In my humble opinion, I think that we want to keep some influence groups around - they aid and play a significant role in pushing policy development forward. Furthermore, the end result of influence groups is that congress gets at a bare minimum of something done, with perhaps a more tight accountability than the districts alone might provide. Because of this, I think that we wouldnt want to get rid of interest groups, even if we could.

Wow, another homerian blog for another week done. Good night and good luck. (props to whoever can identify that line).

As an end thought I'd like to ask, what you think of the impact of interest groups in politics, whether it is good or bad.

module 2

For this module we are to discuss the way that decentralization affects parties and the challenge that it poses for party discipline. we are asked to examine the following questions:
Is decentralization a response to american political heterogeneity?
does decentralization effeci partisan action?
how does this relate to the recent presidential election?

Decentralization affects political parties in a negative way because you end up with a party that doesnt have a necessarily coherent and organized agenda. The primary goal of parties as per our lecture is that they are first meant to get their members re-elected. after that is satisfied, they then focus on forming a coherent agenda of policy.

On casual inference from a voter's perspective, primary party orientation on re-election of it's members might seem a bit backwards. The things that they vote on are the policies their rep are promising. Operationally for the party, it makes a lot of sense. There is no point in postulating a policy if you have no one in office to implement it. I propose that it is becase of this primary focus of the party structure that we see the development of decentralization. The nature of the districts that the various forms of the parties operate in accounts for the variances of the party's policies in different areas and at different levels. it is for the same reason that decentralization occurs. the national chair of the Democratic Party is most likely less suited to dictate the policy of the local Democratic party in Gary, Indiana. As a result of the party's focus on winning seats, the parties have become more focused on the individual persons running for office.

what then is the impact of this political decentralization on party discipline? furhtermore, what is party discipline? if we go with the definition that party discipline is the operational capacity for the members of a party to show in some form combined support for a person or policy. when you have decentralization, the way that you examine party discipline can be measured in several different ways. we can for examine party discipline along the lines of governmental stratification: natonal state and local. It would make sense if there were different levels of party discipline along different governmental levels. now while i do not have any statistics, I will empirically compare national politics to county politics, primarily because I work at the county.

Nationally we see parties that are highly organized parties that are able to a degree push a policy set around in congress and the executive. we see this when party politics becomes very partisan, the most recent display of this could be seen on the debate over the stimulus package. we could take this as an example of high party discipline, and it seems very high when we compare it to local politics at the county. In milwaukee county we have a board, who are independently elected, and who claim no parties. this is our representative wing in our local government. with no organized party lines, we have no party discipline. the board is an example of what would be a highly decentralized organization, and while it is extreme, it can show how too much decentralization can undercut a party altogether.

Ok, so we have explained at least one spot where decentralization might come from, and some of it's impact of party discipline. we now have to provide an accounting for political heterogeneity. first we should ask what is political heterogeneiety? heterogeneiety, simply put is when something is diverse in it's makeup. When applied to the composition of political parties, we call it political heterogeneiety. In practical terms this is another result of parties trying to get their members re-elected - by trying to appeal to more voters, parties try to didversify themselves.

Heterogeneiety in relationship to decentralization therefore seem to be complementary. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that heterogeneity came first, it is unclear that decentralization would necessarily be a response - if anything it seems like it would a progression of the same logic. in short it is not a response.

Finally, we can examine decentralization in relation to the recent presidential election. considering that the president and his party both won a majority in the government, we can reasonably conclude that the Democratic party fell somewhere in the range of being decentralized enough for the party members to win places in congress and the presidency, but at the same time centralized enough to maintain a party identity and begin to look at setting a policy agenda. In really recent politics we could go even further and examine heterogeneity within the democrats in congress. on the cursory look, both parties have been relatively partisan, which means that in effect the parties have not been displaying much diversity of how they vote. 

Wow! We just stumbled upon something big here! There is a difference in how we can examine heterogeneity: 

• There is a broad heterogeneity when we consider the composition of the party membership. We call this the "big tent" aspect to national parties. Put another way the heterogeneiety comes from the fact that the parties are composed up of a wide range of individuals and groups, all with their own agendas but all also having some common ideals which the party gets it's identity from.
  
• There is a second form of heterogeneity which we have just uncovered. There can be a diversity in how the legislative members of the party behave. We can see this in the way that they vote and in the policy agendas that they push
  

this raises some more questions that can be discussed later: what is the relationship between voting heterogeneity and party discipline and centralization? Put in a more pragmatic way: can a member of congress be a "Maverick" and still be a "team player"? when we examine individuals in politics we can see a interesting dynamic in different types of politicians. this stuff is so cool! I can't wait to explore it further! But im going to stop here, because if you've come this far you probably have the patience of a saint.

The Impacts of Partisan Politics

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/08/AR2009020802344.html?sub=AR

I posted this in my class blog in my other class but this article pertains to our discussions as well. It discusses the partisan actions by the GOP in opposition to the stimulus plan. I wonder if the severe partisan reaction to the plan will help the GOP. The article asserts that the younger leadership in the party will try and use this as a means of re-asserting party power and using it as a rally point of sorts for the party to use to re-unify. I find this particularly interesting, because if the results of their action are as monumental as this asserts then it could be either phenominally effective or the opposite could happen and cause a disgrace to the party.

Purpose of Labels

• I have been pondering what the true value of using ideological labels is, when we examine party politics in the US. One perspective is that there are only two parties, so labels should only be used to distinguish between one party and another, as the two parties are the only options people are given. I know that in practice that this is a rather gross oversimplification of our system, but the fact remains that in the greater political picture there really are two major options. Granted there are movements like the green party, but their numbers are still too small to be of any major significance or consequence.
• With such a simple division in our system, why do we see such a diversity of labels on both halves? Why do the Democrats distinguish themselves in progressive extremity as liberals, neo-liberals, socialists and communists? Why do the Republicans do the same thing with their traditional conservatives, old guard, neo-conservatives, religious arm, and fascists?
• this division would seem to weaken the parties, as they would stray from a main central ideology tying the members together. why are there these subdivisions in the two central schools of thought? wouldnt a party-wide consistency aid both parties maintian their identity?

Assignment No. 1

For my first assignment for this class, I am to write about my hopes, dreams and fears regarding studying party politics in America in an online course.

Hopes

I hope to gain a greater understanding for the nuances of intra and inter party politics. I feel that understanding the way that these interplay will aid me not only in understanding the political scene in this country, but that I will be able to apply the same understandings to better understand how politics can play out within offices where I work.

Dreams

I do not have dreams for this course, however I do have a wish; it is to do very well and to figuring out what I need to do to get a good grade.

Fears

I am concerned that what I post on here for my classwork may come back and have a negative repercussion on my future. For example I am a little worried that if I state my opinions on here a future employer may come and read this and draw conclusions based on their interpretations of my opinions instead of my merits.