Author Archives: Mike E.

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U.S. Territories and Voting Rights

Richard Gardiner, a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University, produced this nice map showing the seven inhabited territories over which the United States claims sovereignty around the world. Those inhabited territories are American Samoa, Guam, Midway Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake Islands. (The uninhabited territories, which are not depicted on this map, include Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Navassa Island, and Palmyra Atoll.)

U.S. Territories

As John Oliver recently discussed on his show, a longstanding question has been over whether or not citizens of the inhabited U.S. territories ought to have the right to vote.

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What does “Politics” mean?

I have long been fascinated (and sometimes amused) by the different definitions given by political scientists, political theorists, political leaders and other commentators of the word “politics” (or “the political”). I have decided to start compiling these definitions here. For now, they will be in no particular order, but I may eventually try to bring a little method to the madness (and maybe even take a stab at offering my own definition). And in a few cases, I will list quotes about politics and/or politicians if I think they say something relevant about the meaning of politics (or if they are too funny not to list).

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Useful Blog Post for Provoking Critical Thinking about Civil Liberties

I find Radley Balko’s blog, The Watch, to be a generally useful source of materials for discussing current events pertaining to civil liberties. The fact that his blog is highly opinionated is, in my view, an asset insofar as discussion questions encourage students to critically evaluate his perspective. But at the end of 2014, Balko offered an especially useful post entitled “Horrifying Civil Liberties Predictions for 2015.” The entire post reads, as the title would suggest, as a set of predictions for 2015, but it is actually a roundup of the stories and developments chronicled on The Watch in 2014. I would think this is a wonderful way to get students thinking about civil liberties.

 

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50th Anniversary of Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S.

 Fifty years ago today, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S., the Supreme Court declared constitutional Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination by privately owned businesses, such as motels, theatres and restaurants, that serve as public accommodations.

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How a Bill Becomes a Law Today (and Why Most Bills Never Do)

Vox.com, Ezra Klein’s  “explanatory journalism” venture, is off to a great start. So far, my favorite “articles” have been one called “40 Charts that Explain Money in Politics” and another entitled “Beating the Odds: Why One Bill Made it Through a Gridlocked Congress — and So Many Don’t.” Both are packed full of useful insights into the present state of our political system and policy making process. I highly recommend following the links to these articles and, for that matter, perusing the wealth of insightful content provided at Vox.com. But here I provide an example of the kinds of content they are providing. This is a video they describe as “an updated Schoolhouse Rock lesson for our polarized, dysfunctional Congress.”

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Local Explanatory Journalism at its Finest

Anna Clark, at Columbia Journalism Review, reports on “an exhaustive, densely analytical, data-rich four-part series (one, two, three, four) on partisan polarization in metropolitan Milwaukee, produced this month by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.” As Clark, notes, this series presents a serious challenge to the conventional wisdom that says high quality, deeply explanatory and data-driven journalism is only possible at the national level.

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Your Bill of Rights

It is a few years old now, but I just now found out about this excellent series of short videos on the Bill of Rights produced by Time. As they describe it,

In this series of ten short videos, TIME brings to life the words of the Founding Fathers and explores how these deeply felt ideas about liberty and property have evolved into the amendments as we interpret them today.

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State-Law-Abiding Citizens Facing 10 Years in Prison for Violating Federal Marijuana Law

Nicole Flatow reports:

More than six months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice once again changed its position on marijuana. In the wake of Washington and Colorado laws legalizing recreational marijuana and the proliferation of medical laws, the agency that oversees federal prosecutors called on its U.S. attorneys to avert prosecution of those growers and distributors complying with state law.

U.S. Attorney General Holder also decried the impact of mandatory minimum drug sentences, and directed his prosecutors to avert them in non-violent drug cases — even cases already pending. But in a case set to go to trial next week, federal prosecutors in Washington will seek a ten-year mandatory minimum sentence against a family of individuals with medical marijuana cards who say they were growing marijuana for their own use… (read the rest at ThinkProgress)

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Democratic Party Expected to Have Significant Electoral College Advantage in 2016

Political Scientist Ben Highton explains:

If the 2016 presidential vote is evenly split between the parties, which one is more likely to win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency?  I estimate that the Democrats’ chances of winning the Electoral College vote are between 83 and 89 percent, giving them a significant advantage.  This argument contrasts with those who are cautious of a Democratic advantage, such as Jonathan Bernstein and Harry Enten.  The reason I predict such a significant advantage is because of ongoing, long-term trends altering the electoral outlook in a number of key swing states… (keep reading)

Highton offer a more technical explanation of his methodology here.

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Boston’s Remarkable Experiment with Youth Engagement through Participatory Budgeting

Peter Levine reports:

On Friday, I had the opportunity to observe about 50 Boston young people at work on the city’s youth Participatory Budgeting initiative. I will write the whole story for GOOD Magazine, so this is just a teaser. In essence, volunteer young people (ages 12-25) have brainstormed more than 400 projects that the city could support out of its capital budget. I watched committees of youth come together to study, refine, and screen these proposals. In June, as many youth as possible will be recruited to vote for their favorite proposals at meetings across the city. The city will then allocate $1 million of its capital budget to fund the top-scoring projects.

This is an example of Participatory Budgeting, a process that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 and has since spread to 1,500 locations in many countries, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project. It bears some resemblance to other processes, including the New England town meetings that began in the 1600s and still survive in some towns in our region, not to mention the 265,000 village councils of India and other participatory government mechanisms around the world. It is nevertheless an innovation. . . . (Keep Reading)

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The Road Ahead?

Last week, Ezra Klein wrote an interesting column for Bloomberg News in which he argued American national politics is entering a relatively “dull” era, at least compared to the past thirteen years (since 9/11/2001). He argues that this most recent era in which the “federal government mattered more than at any time since at least the 1960s — perhaps the 1930s” is giving way to one in which Washington D.C. “just isn’t where the action is.”

Klein may or many not be correct in this assessment — and he admits that an unforeseen event could “upend the country” and bring the federal government back to center stage — but what I found most intriguing in his article was his concise but powerful overview of several interesting and important developments around the world in which the U.S. national government currently does not play a prominent role. Since most of these are of great import from a broader civic education point of view (regardless of the U.S. federal government’s centrality to them), I highly recommend reading the entire column. Here are the highlights:

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Great Resource on the U.S. Federal Budget

The National Priorities Project, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary and was nominated for the 2014 Noble Peace Prize, has earned distinction for being “the people’s guide to the federal budget.” The Project’s website is packed full of useful information and resources, but its Federal Budget 101 is the most concise yet informative guide to budget basics I have seen.

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When / Why do People Choose to Contribute to Public Goods?

Are people mostly self-interested egoists who are unlikely to help achieve common goals unless somehow forced or induced to do so by government or other powerful agencies?  Although a lot of people (and the assumptions of traditional economics) suggest the answer is yes, there is reason to doubt this is so. Or, to be more precise, there is good reason to doubt it is true of all or even most people. For example, why does anyone voluntarily vote when there is essentially zero chance that doing so will promote the individual voter’s narrow self-interest? And why do people voluntarily recycle or work with others to help out a neighbor in need? At least some people seem to be motivated by a sense of social obligation or some motive(s) other than narrow egoistic self-interest.

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Does it Matter that Congress is a Millionaire’s Club? Does it Have to Be that Way?

Political scientist Nicolas Carnes answers “yes” and “no”. I highly recommend reading both posts, but here’s a taste:

[L]awmakers from different classes bring different perspectives with them: how they think, how they vote, and the kinds of bills they introduce often depend on the classes they came from. The shortage of lawmakers from the working class tilts decisions about the distribution of economic resources, protections, and burdens in favor of the more conservative policies that affluent Americans tend to prefer. Social safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier, and the tax code is more regressive because working-class Americans are all but absent from our political institutions. . . .

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Is this an Economic Reform Agenda Conservatives and Liberals can Endorse (and Millennials Should Fight for)?

Recently, Jesse A. Myerson has defended five economic reforms that he thinks fellow members of his Millennial Generation should “start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.” Myerson’s proposal is ambitious, including “Guaranteed Work for Everybody” and “Social Security for All [aka universal basic income]”. As one might expect, conservatives and libertarians have been highly critical. One fellow Millennial accused Myerson of trying to convince their generation to have “their livelihoods funded and assigned by the state,” thus completely ignoring the lesson they all were taught by “Lois Lowry’s The Giver in middle school.”

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What Makes for Effective Regulatory Agencies?

Back in 2010, when Congress was contemplating creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Political Scientist Steven Teles wrote an interesting review of Daniel Carpenter’s 856 page history of the Food and Drug Administration, from which Teles drew three “important lessons” for those who favor effective regulation of the financial industry:

First and foremost, while Americans’ skepticism of government is strong, it is not insurmountable. Many Americans think of “bureaucrats” as either ineffectual or self-interested power grabbers, but few feel that way about employees of the FBI, the military, the Social Security Administration, or the National Institutes of Health. And because Americans view these agencies in a positive light, they and their representatives in Congress have been willing to grant them broad power and authority, and in some cases to allow them to exercise power that they have not been explicitly granted—proof that Americans do not oppose handing power to government when they believe it is in trustworthy hands. Just as important, as a result of their reputation these agencies have been able to attract talent that other agencies cannot. . . .

Second, in building an agency with the kind of power that the FDA had at its height, personnel matters. An agency with the ability to control, at least to some degree, its political destiny and strike fear into the hearts of those it regulates requires not only high-quality people, but also people possessed of a particular regulatory spirit. . . .

Finally, developing a powerful organizational image would depend in part on a leadership cadre capable of exploiting the damaged reputation of the financial industry, and taking advantage of new leverage points as they present themselves. The background of the financial crisis obviously should give the CFPA a running start on this. But, as the FDA’s more recent experience shows, the enemies of any regulatory agency with teeth will always be on the lookout for opportunities to strike at its organizational image. Even if the CFPA is able to reshape the financial industry as the FDA once did with Big Pharma, nothing lasts forever. Organizational image, Carpenter suggests, is power—but power based on something as subjective as reputation is also, perhaps inevitably, ephemeral.

The public choice school of political economy has long argued that “regulatory capture”–i.e. the taking over of regulatory agencies by the groups they are supposed to regulate–is nearly inevitable and, thus, effective regulation in the public interest should not be expected. Teles’ and Carpenter’s analysis of the FDA’s experience suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On a related note, Carpenter and David E. Moss have recently published a co-edited volume on the topic of preventing regulatory capture. From the abstract:

When regulations (or lack thereof) seem to detract from the common good, critics often point to regulatory capture as a culprit. In some academic and policy circles it seems to have assumed the status of an immutable law. Yet for all the ink spilled describing and decrying capture, the concept remains difficult to nail down in practice. Is capture truly as powerful and unpreventable as the informed consensus seems to suggest? This edited volume brings together seventeen scholars from across the social sciences to address this question. Their work shows that capture is often misdiagnosed and may in fact be preventable and manageable. Focusing on the goal of prevention, the volume advances a more rigorous and empirical standard for diagnosing and measuring capture, paving the way for new lines of academic inquiry and more precise and nuanced reform.

 

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Sixteen-Year-Olds Vote in Maryland Election

Governing magazine reports:

Takoma Park[, Maryland] recently became the first city in the nation to lower the voting age for local elections to 16. Since the law change in May, 134 voters, ages 16 and 17, registered to vote in municipal elections, and 59 cast ballots in November. That means that roughly 44 percent of registered voters in the under-18 voting bloc participated in the city election.

That’s good news for long-term civic engagement, says . . . [Peter Levine, a professor of citizenship and public affairs at Tufts University], because academic research shows that “voting is habit forming. If you voted in a past election, you tend to vote again.” The question going forward, Levine says, is whether the under-18 voters continue to vote at the same level, or if participation was abnormally high because this was the first time a 16-year-old could vote. When Congress lowered the voting age to 18 in 1972 for federal elections, turnout reached 52 percent for 18-to-24-year-olds, higher than in any year since. Another possibility, Levine says, is that parents and school teachers helped teenagers understand how voting works and what elected city leaders do, which motivated teenagers to vote. [Keep reading]

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The ReDistricting Game

The Annenberg Center and Game Innovation Law at the University of Southern California have produced a nifty game for exploring redistricting and gerrymandering. According to their About Page:

The Redistricting Game is designed to educate, engage, and empower citizens around the issue of political redistricting. . . . By exploring how the system works, as well as how open it is to abuse, The Redistricting Game allows players to experience the realities of one of the most important (yet least understood) aspects of our political system. The game provides a basic introduction to the redistricting system, allows players to explore the ways in which abuses can undermine the system, and provides info about reform initiatives – including a playable version of the Tanner Reform bill to demonstrate the ways that the system might be made more consistent with tenets of good governance. Beyond playing the game, the web site for The Redistricting Game provides a wealth of information about redistricting in every state as well as providing hands-on opportunities for civic engagement and political action.

 

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Do Minimum Wage Increases Kill Jobs?

One of the most famous lessons taught in introductory (micro) economics courses is that, according to economic theory, minimum wage increases have the unintended consequence of  increasing unemployment. Consequently, it is often argued that minimum wage increases actually end up hurting those (i.e. the working poor) whom such policies are supposed to help. As Congress considers increasing the federal minimum wage to $8.20 and certain major cities entertain mandating “living wages” as high as $15, it is worth considering the empirical, as opposed to merely theoretical, economic research on the affects of  minimum wage increases on employment.

Back in February, John Schmitt, Senior Economist at The Center for Economic and Policy Research, reported the following results of his meta-analysis (i.e. systematic analysis of published research findings) of research on this topic published since the year 2000:

… The weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.

The report reviews evidence on eleven possible adjustments to minimum wage increases that may help to explain why the measured employment effects are so consistently small. The strongest evidence suggests that the most important channels of adjustment are: reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; reductions in wages of higher earners (“wage compression”); and small price increases.

Given the relatively small cost to employers of modest increases in the minimum wage, these adjustment mechanisms appear to be more than sufficient to avoid employment losses, even for employers with a large share of low wage workers.

It would seem, then, that as with the Whack-a-Mole Theory of Consumer Credit Regulation, the predictions of this economic theory are currently not supported by empirical evidence. (See also here and here.)

Notice, however, that this research is about “modest increases in the minimum wage.” Thus, this evidence (on its own) does not speak to the question of whether a large increase, like that being considered in Seattle, will lead to an increase in unemployment.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that no empirical finding, no matter how solidly established, is sufficient in itself for settling policy questions. There is no escaping the need to make core value judgments on issues of public policy. For example, libertarians would object to a minimum wage increase out of principle (regardless of its consequences). That is, they would see such a regulation as an illegitimate government intrusion into the freedom of employers and employees to negotiate the terms of employment. On the other hand, progressives sometimes conclude that the benefits created for the employed by a higher minimum wage would outweigh the reduction in overall employment (if this were in fact the consequence of minimum wage increases). Still, the debate over these value questions should be kept separate from the empirical question about the actual effects of minimum wage increases. And the evidence presently suggests we do not face a significant tradeoff between (modestly) higher minimum wages and employment.