Raghuram Rajan is apparently not a fan of electoral democracy, believing it to unduly weight political officials decision-making toward special interests and the short-term. Like Noah Smith I’m struck by the point that this fantasy of autocratic politics as unhampered by special interests is ridiculous:

Rajan seems to believe the common fallacy that autocratic governments answer to no one, and thus have a free hand to make far-sighted investments, as long as the despot happens to be an enlightened one. In fact, autocratic governments also have to answer to someone – but instead of the people, it’s usually a mix of army officers, party cadres, local officials, and mafia goons. There is always a selectorate, and they always have to get paid off. And in an autocracy, those payments can get really expensive, since the selectorate has the autocrat over a barrel – if he loses his job, he doesn’t go off to fish at his ranch, he gets filled with lead and hung from a gas station roof.

Exactly. Part of the genius of electoral democracy is precisely that it lowers the stakes of holding on to power. A member of the House of Representatives who wants to take risks for the sake of doing what he regards as the right thing faces the dire prospect of . . . needing to find another job. Very possibly a job that will pay more money and involve less annoying travel. Laurent Gbagbo, on the other hand, is facing a very bleak fate.

To me the interesting thing about democracies is that they’re much worse at preventing/avoiding/ending recessions than you might think. When Herbert Hoover was president, where was the short-term thinking to keep him in office? Why didn’t the ruling GOP do more in 1960 to ensure that Dwight Eisenhower would be succeeded by Richard Nixon? Why didn’t the 111th Congress enact a much larger fiscal stimulus package and demand looser money from the Fed?

Conversely, while your mileage may vary as to the quality of the policies enacted, it’s hard to deny that over the past two years America has seen lots of focus by politicians on long-term issues. Love the Affordable Care Act or hate the Affordable Care Act, it was clearly an effort to implement long-term change in the American health care system and not a quicky re-election gambit. Similarly, Scott Walker in Wisconsin and other conservatives governors elsewhere are attempting to reduce the structural power of labor unions. In both cases, these are long-cherished goals of party leaders that are being foisted onto the agenda when a more narrow electoral focus would militate in favor of letting sleeping dogs lie.

I have little of substance to say about the Academy Award nominations, but the new voting system does raise a number of psephological issues.

People generally don’t think in detail about this, but the way the awards work is that members of a given branch pick the nominees for any given category, and then the general membership votes on the winner. Consequently, the electorate for the “Best Director” vote and for the “Best Picture” vote is identical. And since in practice nobody ever says “I liked A better than B, but B was ‘better directed’” the Best Director winner almost always wins Best Picture. The reason this doesn’t always happen is that the electorate for the nominations is different, so there’s usually some non-overlap in terms of the nominees. The winners are picked via “first past the post” plurality voting, so the preferences of strong partisans of marginal candidates can impact the outcome. In practice, though, the same movie almost always wins both awards. The new system of 10 best picture nominees changes this by ensuring that at least five non-nominees for Best Director will be nominated for Best Picture.

Tyler Cowen complains that it’s hard to assess proposals for congressional reform since “There is no simple model at hand.”

I think there’s a tragic neglect of comparative politics in the United States, and my favorite relevant model is the one presented in George Tsebelis’ Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. The key issues here are trying to understand who has agenda-setting powers, how many veto players are there, and who the veto players are. And the distressing development in American politics over the past 20 years has been the tendency of routinized filibustering plus growing party discipline to make the Senate Minority Leader into a veto player, especially on things that aren’t top-tier issues that dominate the public discussion.

That’s not really a workable system, though I note that there’s some reason to believe that presidential democracy is unworkable in general if you have ideologically coherent political parties. At a minimum, when the US conquers a country (Italy, Germany, Japan, Iraq) and sets up a new government, we almost never opt to replicate our own system. The exception is Afghanistan where Presidentialism was done at the behest of Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun allies who thought this would help him monopolize power. I think time has proven that insightful, but mostly in a bad way.

The worst thing that happens after most US elections is that people begin to debate whether or not the election in question is/was a “realignment” election.

So when I saw that Stan Collender had a post titled Beware of Those Who Call This Election a Realigment” I was excited. But instead of his argument being the correct one that this is a bogus concept, he’s saying “It may well be a realignment, but anyone who uses that word tonight, tomorrow, or in the next few months to characterize the 2010 election will either be guessing or spinning.”

What you really need to do with realignment-mongering pundits is suggest they read David Mayhew’s Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre in which he persuasively argues that there’s no meaningful “realignment” phenomenon. There’s a good short summary here if you’re interested. To give my own summary, Mayhew’s point is that there’s no dichotomy between two “kinds” of elections. There’s just a lot of elections. Some are more important than others, especially in retrospect. Sometimes a party wins a bunch of elections in a row. Sometimes a voting bloc switches partisan loyalties on an enduring basis. But there’s no “pattern” in which these things all go together. Stuff just happens. Partisan majorities are usually fleeting.

People gaze at the stars and see constellations, but that just goes to show that human intelligence plus random occurrences equals pattern-detection not that there’s some deep underlying structure to the heavens that’s painting pretty pictures for us.

Via John Sides, Ernesto Dal Bó, Pedro Dal Bó, and Jason Snyder on “Political Dynasties” (PDF):

Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that this inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the United States is high compared to other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely reflect permanent differences in family characteristics. On the contrary, using two instrumental variable techniques we find that political power is self-perpetuating: legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.

I think we should probably understand political dynasties in democracies as part of the larger story of the importance of elite signaling in democratic politics. Most people have stronger views about individual figures than they do about “the issues.” So the question becomes how do you extend the brand? Most voters are most effectively reached via partisan branding—something like 80 percent of people are robotic party-line voters—but “swing voters” by definition don’t work this way. Family relationships then become an effective means of extending a positive brand that’s doesn’t involve parties.

Andrew Gelman has a post up about an exchange we had over the weekend. Here’s a historical image of the two-party share of the House vote:

My view is that the right way to understand this is that historically Democrats averaged about 55 percent of the vote because of the weirdness around the one party politics of the Jim Crow South. Then from 1994 on you have a 50/50 average and you should understand the 2008 Democratic landslide as an unsustainable outlier. Gelman points out that this is pretty speculative on my part and that as of January 2009 it was at least possible to argue that the 2008 result was a return to historical norms. Obviously I can’t prove I’ll be right about the future, but I’d like to go on record with my prediction—I think over the next decade or two the parties will be about equal on average. With the current distribution of voters and districts, a 50:50 split of the national vote leads to a GOP majority, so I expect we’ll see small Republican majorities as the most common outcome.