Forceful confrontation to a threat to filibuster is undoubtedly the antidote to the malady. –Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV) Filibuster reform in the US Senate has once again begun to attract attention. In a nutshell, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) is—ahem—upset that—in his opinion, at least—Republican Senators are unreasonably holding up executive branch nominations out of either animus … Read more
I’ve been thinking a lot about signaling lately. The central idea of signaling is hidden (or asymmetric) information. A classic example of signaling is provided by education, or more specifically, “the degree.” Suppose for the sake of argument that a degree is valuable in some intrinsic way: a college degree is arguably worth $1.3 million in additional lifetime … Read more
“Disambiguiating,” as wikipedia fittingly obscurely puts it, Conservatism is a set of political philosophies that favour tradition. My point in this post is a defense of the notion that the Supreme Court’s ruling in US v. Windsor that the “Defense of Marriage Act” is unconstitutional. (The majority’s reasoning in that case—that Section 3 of DOMA amounted to … Read more
A recurring apparent conundrum is the mismatch between Congressional approval (about 14% approval and 78% disapproval) and reelection rates (about 91% in 2012). If Americans disapprove of their legislators at such a high rate, why do they reelect them at an even higher rate? PEOPLE BE CRAZY…AMIRITE? Maybe. A traditional explanation is that people don’t … Read more
The IRS scandal, and in particular the handling (or, mishandling) of it by President Obama’s counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, has raised a classic question: what did the President know, and when did he know it? In my mind at least, the question is predicated on the presumption that the president ought to know everything that is going on … Read more
American politics lately has been centered on SCANDAL! In particular, President Obama has been at the center of several well-publicized controversies, ranging from Benghazi to the IRS to the Department of Justice. The politics of scandal is interesting. For example, in none of the current scandals is there any real evidence that President Obama “did” … Read more
As a theorist, I write models. (There is a distinction between “types” of theorists in political science. It is casually and superficially descriptive: all theorists write models, just in different languages.) One of the biggest complaints I hear—from both (some) fellow theorists and (at least self-described) “non-theorists”—is the following equivalent complaint in different terms: Theorists: …but, … Read more
The idea of a “permission structure” has attracted some attention this week. The basic idea of this phrase, it seems, is as follows: A doesn’t trust B to do some activity X because A fears that B does not have A’s best interests at heart in the “realm” of X. A good example of this … Read more
In light of this week’s horrific series of events in Boston, I (and many others) have been thinking a lot about what exactly the “Miranda warning”—or more specifically, “being Mirandized”—means. There are a lot of angles to this, and I will focus on only one. In the interest of full disclosure, I believe that the … Read more
The debate about gun control provides a great example of a collision between political issues and public policies. As I describe more below, most “political issues” are labels/shortcuts for describing preferences about multiple specific government policies/laws. The point of this post is that gun control, a political issue, is like a cookie. How I feel … Read more