I’m reposting it in honor of the Flat-Earth anti-science crowd — starting with Robert Bryce, of the Manhattan Institute, who tried to make a mockery of Science in the Wall Street Journal concerning a recent experiment related to Einstein’s theory.

But of course we have the larger point that Chris Mooney made in his column on how “Today’s Right is Overwhelmingly More Anti-Science Than Today’s Left.”  And that brought out the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green who pulled a Charlie Sheen.

Progressives don’t need an alternative to Wikipedia because we are fact-based and science-based.  Indeed, science is the foundation of progress.  Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are anti-science and why the extremists among them set up the Conservapedia, which claims to be “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” and brags “Over 290 million Views & Over 900,000 Edits.”

And yet after all those edits, they still have the same unadulterated nonsense on the theory of relativity and all of science that I wrote about 2 years ago.  And so I would ask you to put on your head vises — or your cranial containment field, if you dropped a dime on the deluxe model — and  go back to the future.

First though, it’s worth noting that the Conservapedia entry for Christopher Columbus states, “As conservative historian Wilcomb Washburn explains, if Columbus had not discovered the New World, the process of European discovery might have been very different. Rather than standing as a symbol of inexorable forces, Columbus is better seen as a representative of the spirit of inquiry, Christian religious zeal, and the notable achievements of Western Civilization.”

Yes, Columbus is a representative of the spirit of inquiry in the same way that Conservapedia is representative of an attempt to destroy that same spirit of inquiry, a spirit that created modern science, one of the most notable achievements of civilization.

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.^[1] Here is a list of 24 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.

I would have filed this under Signs of the Apocalypse, but we are way past that.  This is more like, Signs that the Apocalypse happened a long time ago but we were all too busy watching American Idol to notice.

Yes, there is a Conservapedia and its main benefit to society is that it  apparently occupies the  time of the great many conservatives who  post  meticulously-footnoted articles like the one above, titled, “Counterexamples to Relativity.”

It is hard to know what is the most  mind-boggling thing  about this particular article.  Footnote 1 reads:

See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

Really?  The Bible outsells The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a hundred-fold?   Well then it must be literally true word-for-word.   That’s how we know, for instance, that the Sun moves around the Earth*.  But still,  I am puzzled how this is a counter example:

The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54….

You can click on the second link to read the story in the conservative translation of the Bible –  didn’t know there was a conservative translation, did you, ye of little  ideological faith?

But I don’t see how that story of Jesus healing somebody proves action at a distance instantaneously.  Indeed,  in the conservative translation of the relevant verse

So he asked them the exact hour when he began to feel better, and they told him, “His fever broke yesterday, at about one pm.”

Then the father realized that this was the exact hour when Jesus said to him, “your son lives,” so both he and his entire house believed.

Silly conservatives.   You would need to demonstrate that  the healing took place exactly when Jesus spoke to disapprove the special theory of relativity –  rather than say a tiny fraction of a second later.  But in your retranslation, the testimony is only “about one pm” –  rather than the King James version:

And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.

And  for the record, I was taught relativity, understand it to be very well verified, and I continue to read the King James Bible.  It contains much one can learn from and is one of the two definitive  rhetoric texts in English along with the complete works of Shakespeare.  But I digress.

You may be wondering how Barack Obama ”allegedly” used  the theory of relativity  to mislead people.   For that you have to go to the Conservapedia entry on the “Theory of relativity“:

Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion.^[45] As of June 2008, over 170 law review articles have cited this liberal application of the theory of relativity to legal arguments.

Before clicking on the link to the footnote, PLEASE PUT YOUR HEAD IN A SECOND VISE!

I know that you are thinking now that this is some  sort of massive spoof by The Onion. But DailyKos actually recalled that the Onion had mocked the anti-science  ideologues of the right years ago:

The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are demanding that the law be repealed.

The truly sad thing about the Conservapedia entry is that it treats the theory of relativity like global warming or evolution — as some  insidious liberal plot that needs to be debunked using pseudoscience.

And so we learn that one of the counter examples to relativity is:

The universe shortly after its creation, when quantum effects dominated and contradicted Relativity.

But where in the Bible does it say that the universe, shortly after its creation, was dominated by quantum effects to the exclusion of relativity?  Geez.  I  have no freaking idea where these guys get their information!

Seriously, or rather, semi-seriously, how can you possibly quote astrophysics to refute relativity?  Why even bother?

Weirdly, the entry on the theory of relativity includes this:

Creation scientists such as physicists Dr. Russell Humphreys and Dr. John Hartnett have used relativistic time dilation to explain how the earth can be only 6,000 years old even though cosmological data (background radiation, supernovae, etc.) set a much older age for the universe.

Conservatives need to get their story straight on Einstein!  Is he liberal — conservative?

*If you go to the Conservapedia entry on Copernicus to find out what conservatives believe about whether the Earth goes around the Sun and that part of Joshua that suggests the Sun does move around the Earth, you learn this:

The reception to his work was initially positive within the Catholic Church. Years later, the Church reconsidered in connection with claims by Galileo that the Copernican model had been proven correct. Copernicus’ book was suspended until corrected by the Index of the Catholic Church in 1616, because the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun “is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture”. ^{[1] [2]} These corrections were indicated in 1620, and nine sentences had to be either omitted or changed.^[3] The book stayed on the Index until 1758. In the 20th century, scientists adopted a view closer to the Church scientists. The consensus is now that motion is relative, that Earth-centered and Sun-centered coordinate systems are equally valid for astronomical calculations, that Galileo’s main argument for the Copernican system was fallacious,^[4] and that the doctrine of the immobility of the Sun is false.^[5]

Yes, the earth-centered system is equally valid to the  sun-centered … because of Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Darn it,  I forgot to put my second vise on!

And how do we know that the doctrine of the immobility of the sun is false?  The footnote says:

“The Sun orbits around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”

But were does the idea of black holes come from?  Here’s  the Conservapedia entry on black holes:

Black holes are theoretical entities popularized by pseudoscience despite their implausibility and lack of ever being directly observed. Suggested by the controversial theory of relativity (see Counterexamples to Relativity), black holes are postulated to be collapsed objects, usually stars, which have become so dense that within a certain radius their escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Thus, they absorb all matter and energy within that radius. Light and matter can enter, but nothing can ever escape.

Black holes are increasingly favored by liberal publications, such as the science page of the New York Times and glossy magazines, as well as science fiction writers.

Damn you, glossy magazine!

So black holes are another relativistic liberal plot.  But if so, that how can they be cited as evidence that the doctrine of the immobility of the sun is false?  So that means the doctrine of the immobility of the sun must be true — and the  literal translation of the Bible is false.  And that means all of Conservapedia must be bunk….

Ironically, few things have done  more to undermine religion than this bizarre notion that every single word of the Bible is literally true — or, to  be more accurate, that every single word of whatever particular translation somebody likes, and whatever particular books one accepts as part of the Bible, are literally true.

But still, this all begs the question, who actually wastes their time coming up with all of this Conservapedia nonsense?

Happy Anti-Flat-Earth Day!

Note:  I am aware that Columbus didn’t disprove the “flat earth myth,” but then he “was not the first European explorer to reach the Americas” either.  So it’s even more fitting that today is anti-flat-earth Day.

If you wonder why the public is so ill-informed about global warming, the following head-exploding story is illuminating.  The New York Times appears to be downplaying the role of climate change.  You be the judge.

A few weeks ago, some experts on public health and the hydrological cycle came out with a nuanced study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene examining some recent theories as to why cholera outbreaks occur.

The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene put out a news release headlined:

Scientists pinpoint river flow associated with cholera outbreaks, not just global warming

Previously, some scientists had seen a correlation between sea surface temperature and cholera outbreaks in certain locations, like the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal.  That puzzled the authors of this new study, “Warming Oceans, Phytoplankton, and River Discharge: Implications for Cholera Outbreaks” (PDF here) for two reasons:

1. High SSTs are normally associated with a decrease in phytoplankton — the authors cite 8 studies on this.  (See also, Nature Stunner: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”).
2. High-levels of phytoplankton are thought to lead to cholera outbreaks.  The causal agent of cholera hangs around with copepods, small crustaceans that feed on phytoplankton.  So it’s been theorized that “high levels of phytoplankton may lead to high numbers of cholera-containing copepods, increasing the likelihood of cholera epidemics in coastal human populations.”

What the new study found was that in the Bay of Bengal and other large river basins -‑ the Orinoco (in South America), the Congo, and the Amazon — “The positive relationship between phytoplankton blooms and ocean temperature is related to large river discharges,” said Shafiqul Islam, PhD, the lead investigator of the study and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts.  The rivers discharge “terrestrial nutrients.”

The release notes:

But Islam said that global warming may play a role in other ways in outbreaks of cholera, including contributing to droughts and high salinity intrusion in the dry season and floods in the wet season. Both of those conditions have been found also to contribute to cholera epidemics, as published recently in the journal Water Resources Research. “If river flows are more turbulent, if droughts are more severe, if flood is more severe, cholera is more severe,” he said. “But cholera may not have direct linkage with rising sea surface temperatures.”

Okay, so the main result of the study is that cholera outbreaks may not be causally linked with rising SSTs — though the authors can’t make a definitive statement on that (if you actually talk to them).  But cholera outbreaks have been appear to be linked to extreme flooding as well as extreme drought, both of which, of course, have been projected — and even observed — to increase because of climate change!

So what is the headline of the New York Times story?

Seriously.

The news release doesn’t say this at all — quite the reverse.  The study doesn’t say this — if you read it.  Nor do the authors — quite the reverse.   I had an extended interview with Islam yesterday, and, to be clear, he explains that this study simply can’t say whether or not there is a linkage between warmer SSTs and cholera.  But his work does suggest that the kind of extreme weather linked to climate change is a culprit in outbreaks.  Note — “a culprit,” not the only one.

The New York Times appears to have read the news release, but decided to run with its own perverse narrative.  I say that based on the final paragraph of the Times story, which is lifted from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene release:

• NYT:  “Cholera seems to be gaining a foothold in more places than it used to,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “We obviously need to be taking a different approach.”
• Release:  “Cholera seems to be gaining a foothold in more places than it used to be,” Hotez said. “We used to see shorter outbreaks, but in Africa, and now in Haiti, we’re seeing nationwide epidemics lasting months or more than a year. We obviously need to be taking a different approach.”

But the release makes clear that the study is not saying that global warming isn’t a culprit, and the quote in the release from Islam makes clear that in fact it probably is a contributing factor.  What is the New York Times doing here, rewriting a headline, ignoring a crucial quote, and generally not doing any actual journalism?

If the New York Times had bothered to talk to Islam, he would have explained the link to climate change in more detail,  since he has written multiple studies on the subject, including “Hydroclimatic influences on seasonal and spatial cholera transmission cycles: Implications for public health intervention in the Bengal Delta” and “Dual peak cholera transmission in Bengal Delta: A hydroclimatological explanation.”  Islam’s work has shown that both extreme flooding and extreme drought can trigger cholera outbreaks.

In fact, in the Bengal Delta’s dual cholera peak, his research finds that “the spring peak is linked to the severity of drought and the fall peak is linked to the severity of flooding.”

He explained that climate change projections for South Asia mean that “extremes will become more extreme, there will be more flood or drought, and that means cholera will net increase.”

What’s even more perverse is that the NY Times piece contains these paragraphs:

Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming.

A bigger factor may be the cycle of droughts and floods along big rivers, according to Tufts University scientists who published a study in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene this month….

Warmer ocean surface waters suppress plankton growth, so scientists had assumed cholera outbreaks would decrease with global warming.But satellite photographs of the mouths of the Ganges, Amazon, Congo and Orinoco Rivers suggest that heavy rainfall and glacier melt have the bigger effect by washing soil nutrients down rivers to feed the plankton blooms.

Is the NY Times really unaware that global warming is not only linked directly to heavy rainfall but obviously to glacier melt?

It is embarrassingly bad stories like these that give credence to the claim by John Horgan, a former Scientific American staff writer who directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology:

Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.

The  one thing we can say with very high confidence about human-induced global warming is that if we  take no serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the foreseeable future — a do-nothing strategy advanced by fossil-fuel interests and supported by a complacent media — then global warming represents the most serious threat to humanity we have ever known.

It’s entirely possible to make shows about politicians without referring to their party affiliations, especially if you show them mostly in isolation, brooding over power and tactics, and even easier if you don’t engage with policy, just with the exercise of brute force. But especially if you’re making a television program about tough-as-nails Chicago politicians, eschewing party politics means you’re giving up most of the means by which that brute force is exercised, and by which the objects of that force are defined. If you’re going to have enemies in political stories, you have to figure out who they are, and parties are useful identifiers, whether your foe is an ideological rival, a procedural one, or your rival for position within the hierarchy of the party itself.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the folks who make smart television don’t want to risk their audience before a show even starts airing, especially if, like Starz, you’re trying to establish yourself as destination channel for smart original content that doesn’t involve people getting naked and killing each other in arenas. But Democratic and Republican politics don’t play out the same way on the local level — even in big cities — as they do nationally. Parks and Recreation‘s been an incredibly effective demonstration of that. It would be entirely possible to have Kelsey Grammar, who is playing a Rahm-like politician on the show Boss, have Rahm’s personally aggressive style without attaching Rahm’s voting record and stances in the Obama administration to him, using a series of local issues and relationships with local stakeholders to define him as a Democrat or a Republican.

Or even if that’s too touchy, why not invent a couple of fictional political parties? That kind of work happens most often in science fiction, scabrous satirical humor, or in Dave Barry books, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in more realistic dramas, in ways that are usefully thought-provoking. I’d be curious to see a long-running exploration of what it would be like to have one party that’s fairly interventionist on both moral and social safety net issues, opposing abortion, equal rights for gay couples, and the death penalty while supporting universal health care and heavy taxes on the wealthiest citizens positioned against a much more staunchly libertarian party that’s pro-choice, low-tax, low social services, etc. One of the best things about Kings was that it didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the new framework that it was operating in: the show just sort of plunged in and let you figure out the importance of the powerfully active military-industrial complex. While I like Kings, it’s also reasonably obvious why it didn’t find a network following — the lead actor simply isn’t very good, and the religious stuff is incredible, but probably would have found a more natural audience on a network like HBO, which also would have found alternative ways to support its heavy production costs.

But I don’t think that fate would necessarily attach to a show that was more of our world, with smaller but significant tweaks to the positions that, bundled together, define political parties. We can make a nigh-infinite number of television shows about the nature of power as a raw, elemental thing (especially if they star Ian McShane). But they’re not the only kind of fiction we need to help us consider our political system and the future that our politics will define. Our parties are held together by duct tape, temperamental similarities, entrenched hatred, tears, and determination, but not necessarily by consensus or logic. We’re settled into them for now, but at some point, someone more effective than the Reform Party, or No Labels, or Unity ’08 might come along and present a viable alternative. Our pop culture’s daintiness about parties is in odd contrast to the brutality of our political contests.

A US Geological Survey study released today suggests that snowpack declines in the Rocky Mountains over the last 30 years are unusual compared to the past few centuries. Prior studies by the USGS and other institutions attribute the decline to unusual springtime warming, more precipitation falling now as rain rather than snow and earlier snowmelt.

The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, foreshadowing a strain on water supplies. Runoff from winter snowpack – layers of snow that accumulate at high altitude – accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.

That’s from a USGS news release for an important new study in Science, “The Unusual Nature of Recent Snowpack Declines in the North American Cordillera” (subs. req’d).

What’s most worrisome is that we now have three major trends driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases that threaten to significantly worsen drought and water problems in the West and Southwest:

1. Less precipitation in many areas (see NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path)
2. Less snowpack, as this USGS study found
3. Hotter temperatures (see SW could see a 60-year drought like that of 12th century — only hotter — this century)

Assuming the anti-science disinformers continue to block any serious action,  these catastrophic changes will last a long, long time (see NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

For the record, it was the possibility of losing the Sierra snowpack in the second half of the century that led our Nobel prize-winning Energy Secretary to warn in 2009, “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Here’s more on the new study:

USGS scientists, with partners at the Universities of Arizona, Washington, Wyoming, and Western Ontario, led the study that evaluated the recent declines using snowpack reconstructions from 66 tree-ring chronologies, looking back 500 to more than 1,000 years. The network of sites was chosen strategically to characterize the range of natural snowpack variability over the long term, and from north to south in the Rocky Mountains.

With a few exceptions (the mid-14th and early 15th centuries), the snowpack reconstructions show that the northern Rocky Mountains experience large snowpacks when the southern Rockies experience meager ones, and vice versa. Since the 1980s, however, there were simultaneous declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.

“Over most of the 20th century, and especially since the 1980s, the northern Rockies have borne the brunt of the snowpack losses,” said USGS scientist Gregory Pederson, the lead author of the study. “Most of the land and snow in the northern Rockies sits at lower and warmer elevations than the southern Rockies, making the snowpack more sensitive to seemingly small increases in temperature. Also, winter storm tracks were displaced to the south in the early 20th century and post-1980s. Forest fires were larger, more frequent and harder to fight, while Glacier National Park lost 125 of its 150 glaciers.”

But  what about all that snow we got this year?

USGS scientist and co-author Julio Betancourt explains that “The difference in snowpack along the north and south changed in the 1980s, as the unprecedented warming in the springtime began to overwhelm the precipitation effect, causing snowpack to decline simultaneously in the north and south. Throughout the West, springtime tends to be warmer during El Niño than La Niña years, but the warming prior to the 1980s was usually not enough to offset the strong influence of precipitation on snowpack.”

The La Niña episode this year is an example with lots of snow in the north while severe drought afflicts the south. But, in the north, this year’s gains are only a small blip on a century-long snowpack decline.

The bottom line is that the climate has changed, perhaps permanently:

This study supports research by others estimating that between 30-60 percent of the declines in the late 20th century are likely due to greenhouse gas emissions. The remaining part of the trend can be attributed to natural decadal variability in the ocean and atmosphere, which is making springtime temperatures that much warmer.

“What we have seen in the last few decades may signal a fundamental shift from precipitation to temperature as the dominant influence on western snowpack” Pederson said.

What’s particularly worrisome is that we’ve seen these dramatic and harmful changes already — and we’ve only warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  The problem for our children and grandchildren is that if we continue anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway, we are on track to warm five times times that or more this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F ).

Another 2011 study, “The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis,” finds that drought and reduced precipitation in the U.S. SW alone could cost up to $1 trillion by century’s end.

The time to act was a long time ago, but now is still better than later.

Related Post:

• USGS on Dust-Bowlification: Drier conditions projected to accelerate dust storms in the U.S. Southwest
• Steven Chu’s full global warming interview: “This is a real economic disaster in the making for our children, for your children”

Below are the earlier comments from the Facebook commenting system:

Matthew Stephen Hall

To the West it all flows to fill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Havasu to irrigate a few thousand golf courses :(

June 15 at 12:08am

Chris Paradise

Chalk another one up for Skep Sci’s “supports AGW” bubbles. I also like the preemptive addressing of the “this year it snowed a packload” argument, as that is likely to be one of the first questions asked (either aggressively or as an authentic question) after seeing the report. It never hurts to remind people that weather will be weather, but the climate trends are pretty clear by this point.

June 13 at 6:51pm

Mark David Oliver

http://www.guardian.co.uk/​world/2011/jun/13/extreme-​weather-flooding-droughts-​fires

June 14 at 7:21am

Zimzones@hotmail.com

They’re already fighting over access to Colorado River water for irrigation. It really upsets the rich ranchers that Native Americans have unlimited access to the river water while the ranchers have to get permits, waiting period and limited access.
This conflict will get worse, spread to other watersheds & eventually lead to people getting injured over water disputes.
Now you see why the Bush family bought 90,000 acres in Paraguay that sits atop the largest freshwater aquafier in the western hemisphere.

June 14 at 2:29pm

Joy Hughes

“Whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’ over…” There has always been fighting over water here in the West. On the creek where I live, before the turn of the last century, a man was killed with an irrigation shovel.

June 14 at 11:58pm

Joan Savage

One feature that has been brought up in news stories, but not so much in the Science article, is a fear of too-rapid melt of the snow pack leading to more flooding. One of the beauties of the snow pack for water supply in the past has been gradual release for irrigation and urban use, but that’s at risk with a rapid melt. I haven’t yet found a data set that shows rate of melt compared over the years.

June 13 at 11:37pm

Julia Kuglen

Not as far west as the Rockies, but in drought territory:

“Llano is experiencing its worst drought in more than half a century, city officials said.

As of Wednesday, the Llano River, which normally courses through town at 158 cubic feet per second this time of year, was flowing at 3.8 cubic feet per second — the slowest since 1953, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The river is the city’s sole source of drinking water.

Officials expect the river’s flow to stop as soon as the end of this week, prompting bans on personal car washing, sprinkler use and pool filling.

The city has between 60 and 90 days of untreated water stored behind two dams, said City Manager Finley deGraffenried. But with the water as low as it is, it might be too cloudy or contain too much algae to be treated.

When those stores are gone, the city may need to dig wells or truck in water, deGraffenried said.”

June 16 at 12:12am

Tyler Austin

The wheat crop in Alberta is crap this year, expect higher bread prices as we export our surplus down south. Oh and lumber paper pulp is also going to skyrocket as the north here is to muddy for extraction.

June 15 at 1:55pm

dougaway

I dunno. Cliff Mass has a more benign take on this study. He makes some good points.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.​com/2011/06/scary-snowpack​-stories.html

-Douglas

June 14 at 1:34am

George Ennis

Curious why Mr. Mass has no comments on his blog from one of the report writers. After all they are at the same university. It would be interesting to see such a discussion.

June 14 at 10:00am

Leif Erik Knutsen

Cliff is also relating to the West Coast ranges which because of the moderating effect of the Pacific are experiencing some of the least long term response. Thou the average snow pack is remaining “average”, cycles and extremes do appear to be intensifying to this long term resident and weather watcher.

June 14 at 10:12am

Sallie Coffman

Scary stuff!

June 13 at 10:56pm

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.

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.

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.

You rarely get a single anecdote that tells you so much about how the American polity operates:

Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues on the Senate floor as a conquering general returning from war. Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), in charge of the Senate Democrats’ campaign effort, gave her a hug and a kiss and said, “Now we just have to raise money.” Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.”

Lincoln received bipartisan hugs, kisses, handshakes and even a fist bump. Sen. Claire McCaskill applauded and let out a “woo-hoo.”

The ideal of governing in a manner that’s equidistant from rival interest groups (which even as “clarified” is clearly what Schumer is saying) is basically worthy. But in the American context, there’s a dangerous lack of balance. Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal, but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party—much less a leader—who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basically describing polyarchy or interest-group pluralism. But the imbalance between Schumer and his rivals on the other side of the aisle reflects what Charles Lindblom ended up criticizing as the “privileged position of business in polyarchy.”

Andrew Gelman elaborates on the conditions that make U.S. presidential elections pretty predictable, but that don’t let us say the same thing about other kinds of elections:

(a) A long history: we can predict this year’s election, to some extent, from last year’s. The U.S. isn’t a country like Guatemala where they’ve only been having competitive elections for a few years.

(b) Clear separation between the parties. Talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum aside, the Democrats and Republicans are, according to Huber and Stanig, further apart on economic issues than are left and right groupings in just about every other industrialized country.

(c) Only two major candidates. Anderson in 1980, Perot in 1992 and 1996: they cane close but they didn’t quite make it a real three-candidate race. It basically worked to focus on the Democrat and the Republican.

(d) Equal resources. Not quite: Nixon reputedly massively outspent McGovern in 1992, Bush had the edge over Gore in 2000, and Obama had a few hundred million to spare in 2008. Still, compared to referenda and elections for congress and governor, presidential races are on a pretty level playing field.

(e) A clear schedule: Voters have many months to sort out the information and make up their minds.

This is worth keeping in mind when you hear the intuitively wrong-sounding empirical results on the lack of campaign effects. What the political science is telling you isn’t that presidential election campaigns couldn’t make a difference to election outcomes, it’s telling you that they don’t seem to make a difference in practice. But if one candidate just refused to fundraise, or did fundraise but did something wildly eccentric with the money, then for all we know that might make a big difference. You could imagine a candidate deliberately trying to tank the race, or just acting plain-out weird. What if John McCain delivered lengthy speeches denouncing his own policy agenda? But in practice we always see two well-funded, well-known candidates run pretty conventional campaigns and within that context the ups-and-downs of the campaign trail don’t seem to make a difference.

To put it another way, when the race is between candidate A and candidate B, you might as well vote for the candidate you prefer, no matter who happens to be in the lead—and the evidence is that people do just that. I’ve not seen evidence of any bandwagon effects in races between two candidates of opposing parties. But when the race is between A, B, and C, then, yes, your vote choice can definitely be affected by the possibility that C really has a chance of winning.

To put it yet another way: Elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved.

That seems right on a theoretical level. If you look at something like the latest poll out of Canada you can see that a bunch of people who are telling pollsters they’ll vote Green or NDP are facing a tactical issue about whether it makes sense to cast a tactical vote for the Liberals. At the same time, there’s good reason to think that many Liberal voters would be turned off by explicit Liberal-NDP collaboration. So on its face, research about campaign effects in US presidential elections shouldn’t tell us much about this situation. But for a political scientist’s post on a political science topic, Gelman’s was uncharacteristically lacking in specific references to research on the subject—I wonder what’s out there, but couldn’t quite come up with the right combination of search terms to find anything relevant.

Both the Hill and Roll Call have accounts today of an apparently testy exchange between Obama and Sen. Corker at a lunchtime, closed-door meeting yesterday:

“I said, ‘I got to tell you something, there’s a degree of audacity in you being here today,’” Corker said, recalling his exchange with the president. “If you look at your three major initiatives they were almost all done on party-line votes,” Corker told Obama. “I feel we’re all props here today.

“Just last week you engineered a very partisan vote,” Corker added. “I would just like for you to explain to me, when you get up in the morning, and when you come over to lunch like this, how you reconcile that duplicity.”

Obama, of course, has worked very hard the last two years to reach out to Republicans. And Corker, if we take him as his word, would really like to cooperate (he sort of tried it seems on financial reform). But Obama’s failure to secure bipartisanship is hardly duplicitous. The fact of the matter is Obama and Corker are dealing with structural forces that are much larger than themselves. Alan Abramowitz documents this in a paper that he recently presented here at William and Mary, arguing that the partisan divide in Washington is simply a reflection of the partisan divide in the voting public — and not just the political elite:

The gradual disappearance of conservative Democrats and moderate-to-liberal Republicans has had a clear impact on the electoral coalitions of Democratic and Republican Senate candidates. … [O]ver the past four decades on the [American National Election Study] 7- point liberal-conservative scale…the gap between the average location of Democratic and Republican voters has more than doubled, from .8 units to 1.7 units. In 1972, conservative identifiers made up 30 percent of Democratic Senate voters and 43 percent of Republican Senate voters. In 2008, conservative identifiers made up 19 percent of Democratic Senate voters and 72 percent of Republican Senate voters.

Abramowitz concludes, “Rather than indicating that there is a ‘disconnect’ between politicians and voters, polarization in Congress actually indicates that Democratic and Republican members are accurately reflecting the views of the voters who elected them.” He also suggests that the effect of this is more obvious in the Senate than in the House due to reliance on unanimous consent and the filibuster.

It seems that the sooner Obama et al recognize this political reality and learn to work with in it, the better. Recent weeks suggest, however, that the President is getting there.

Steve Teles writes in with a sharp take on the Liberal/Conservative coalition in the U.K.:

I think there’s another way to think about the coalition, which is not to think of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats as internally coherent parties. Rather, it’s better to think of both of them as internally heterogeneous. The Conservatives have a more liberal wing, which Cameron and his clique are part of. The LibDems have a more socially democratic (and public-service-delivery) wing, and a more liberal (in the European sense) wing, which Clegg, Laws, and Cable are part of. The coalition makes a certain amount of strategic sense if you think of both governing cadres as wanting to have power, but also to govern from their part of their own party coalition. Cameron gets to use the coalition as an excuse not to do the things that his more conservative party members want, and Clegg gets a similar excuse with his more social democratic members. So while the coalition doesn’t make as much sense from the point of view of the median of each party, it does make sense given that the leadership of each party is closer to the ideological center than their party median.

Certainly I think the general view in the late-1990s was that Tony Blair in many ways regretted the fact that he won such a big majority in 1997—what he really wanted was to be “forced” into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats precisely because, per what Teles writes, that would have strengthened his hand vis-à-vis the Labour left.

Many cars (cc photo by Sylvar)

One favorite trick of American political journalism is to notice that some states are liberal and some are conservative, then to notice that the liberal states have some characteristics, and then make inferences about the characteristics of individual liberals by attributing the qualities of the states in which they reside to them. For example, since wealthier states are more liberal, you can assert that liberal voters are richer than salt-of-the-earth conservative types. This mode of inference, though popular, is also mistaken. It’s known as the “ecological fallacy.” But that never seems to stop it. Thus, for example, there’s this from The Washington Times:

The Volvo-driving liberal and the redneck in a Chevy pickup are long-held stereotypes. But a map of car ownership – produced by R.L. Polk & Co. – overlaid on the electoral map reveals the surprising extent to which how we vote corresponds with what we drive.

Blue-staters on each coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle and from Boston to the District, are the most likely to drive foreign cars. Domestic brands have their highest levels of market share in the mostly conservative interior of the country.

Now as it happens, it does appear to be true that there are strong correlations out there between individual voting behavior and individual consumption patterns. So there’s probably some legitimate results to be found in this area if you really look into it. More enlightening than the “foreign vs domestic” issue would probably be to look at kinds of cars—who buys trucks and SUVs versus who buys conventional cars.

Manuel Zelaya

Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora offers up the brief-but-informative take on what happened in Honduras that I’ve been waiting for:

As other Latin American leaders, President Zelaya fell victim to the virus of presidential reelection, an institution with questionable pedigree in a region that has paid a dear price for its fondness of caudillos. The real problem, however, was that by organizing a de facto referendum to test the popularity of his idea, Zelaya pursued his ambition with total disregard of his country’s constitution. The latter explicitly forbids holding referenda—let alone an unsanctioned “popular consultation”—to amend the constitution and, more specifically, to modify the presidential term. Unsurprisingly, the president’s idea met with the resistance of Congress, nearly all parties (including his own), the press, business, electoral authorities, and, crucially, the Supreme Court, that deemed the whole endeavor illegal. Last week, when the President demanded the Armed Forces’ support to distribute the electoral material to carry out his “opinion poll,” the military commander refused to comply with the order, was summarily dismissed for his refusal, and later reinstated by the Supreme Court. The president then cited the troubling history of military intervention in Honduran politics, a past that the country—under more prudent governments—had made great strides in leaving behind in the past two decades. He forgot to mention that the order that he issued was illegal. [...]

Now the Honduran military have responded in kind: an illegal referendum has met an illegal military intervention, with the avowed intention of protecting the constitution. Moreover, as has been so often the case, this intervention has been called for and celebrated by Zelaya’s civilian opponents. For the past week, the Honduran Congress has waxed lyrical about the armed forces as the guarantors of the constitution, a disturbing notion in Latin America. When we hear that, we can expect the worst. And the worst has happened. At the very least, we are witnessing in Honduras the return of the sad role of the military as the ultimate referee in the political conflicts amongst the civilian leadership, a huge step back in the consolidation of democracy.

His policy suggestion is that the United States and the Organization of American States should push for Zelaya to be reinstated. They point out that if Honduran civilians want to attempt to prosecute Zelaya through the civilian legal system, they can do that. One thing that I continue not to understand about this situation is does Honduras not have an impeachment mechanism through which congress can depose Zelaya? It seems to me that if the congress is inclined to go along with an anti-Zelaya military coup, there ought to have been some legal mechanism in place through which they could have changed presidents without subverting democracy.

As a more general point, my understanding of the evidence continues to be that parliamentary systems are less prone to constitutional crisis and breakdown. Latin America would do well to stop imitating us yankees and start imitating the vast majority of stable democracies. What’s more, for small countries like Honduras it seems to me that total demilitarization (à la Costa Rica) looks like a very attractive option.

The United States Senate also provides a convenient test of this idea, since it offers up a series of pairs of politicians who are accountable to identical groups of voters. But when you look at opposite-party senate pairs, you don’t see a great deal of similarity in their voting records. Or to look at it another way, everyone knows that the voters in Louisiana are more liberal than the voters in Iowa. And this helps explain why Mary Landrieu is more conservative than Tom Harkin. But Mary Landrieu isn’t more conservative than Chuck Grassley. The ordering of those states’ four Senators, from left to right, is Harkin (D-IA) then Landrieu (D-LA) then Grassley (R-IA) then Vitter (R-LA) — the partisan affiliation of the senator tells you more about their voting behavior than does knowledge about the electorate they represent. Indeed, in terms of DW-NOMINATE exactly zero Senate Democrats in the 110th or 109th Senates compiled a voting record more conservative than that of the leftmost Republican (first Chaffee then Olympia Snowe) even though in both cases many Democrats represented states whose median voters are more conservative than the median voter in Maine or Rhode Island.

Part of the answer here is presumably that it’s relatively rare for an incumbent American politician to actually face a competitive re-election bid. Incumbent Senators do frequently form cross-party alliances to defend parochial local interests, for fairly obvious reasons, so it’s not as if people are behaving recklessly with their careers. Helping out local influentials is presumably not only (locally) popular, but actually helps ward off challengers. I would also note that it’s not obvious to me how an incumbent politicians would really go about assessing median voter sentiment—issue polling is legendarily unreliable and subject to massive framing bias.

In a recapitulation of early talk of trying to write a stimulus bill that could secure eighty votes in the United States Senate, we’re now hearing things about Democratic Senators being eager to water down a health care reform bill in hopes of securing seventy votes to pass it. Brendan Nyhan observes that the most oft-stated rationale for the pursuit of this sort of majority is policy stability, bipartisan legislation is said to be more enduring and less subject to massive overall. He also observes that the evidence for this in the political science literature is pretty weak and ambiguous.

Any reasonable president or legislative leader should, I think, make a serious effort to bring as many people into the process who are genuinely interested in reform. And of course it makes sense to go the extra mile in terms of “courting” and so forth to try to get votes from across the aisle. But when you’re talking about a major policy concession like gutting a public option that could save the country hundreds of billions of dollars, then I think you ought to have a very good reason for making the concession. Speculative ideas about stability don’t, it seems to me, make the cut.

And of course it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that some people who are citing Republican opposition as the reason for opposition to a robust public option may be dissembling to some extent. Bold progressive reform like a robust public option tends to threaten powerful and well-heeled interests. Many legislators—from both parties—are not always eager to threaten those interests. But legislators are also not eager to be seen as caving to powerful interests. If you can do what the special interests want, like drop a public plan, but say that you only did it at the insistence of someone else (Republicans!) then you get to have your cake and eat it, too. You’re not opposed to a public plan, you can assure people, but you’re a pragmatist. Then behind closed doors you can remind the special interests that when the chips were down you saved them.