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
Yesterday, the Senate—in line with expectations—rejected the most basic of gun control proposals. In light of the Newtown massacre—an event that shook all of us—this might seem shocking. For example, even leaving aside the emotional pull that perhaps we can as a nation call that horrible day back and make it right, the proposal arguably … Read more
[This is an installment in my irregular series of articles on the minutiae of what I do, “Inside Baseball.”] Lately I have been working on a couple of models with various signaling aspects. It has led me to think a lot more about both “testing models” and common knowledge of beliefs. Specifically, a central question … Read more
President Obama proposed his 2014 budget this week. A huge document, it contains a number of interesting policy proposals. One that is attracting a lot of attention concerns the “chained CPI.” In a nutshell, this change will reduce the rate of growth in social security payments over the next decade. Overall, the proposal arguably represents a compromise with … Read more