Archive for April, 2012

“Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.” -H.L. Mencken The quadrennial two-week General Conference of the Methodist Church is currently running. Well, then. We’ve got lots to talk about. I don’t think there’s a more quintessentially American institution of civil society than the Methodist Church. An...
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Most of this post is housekeeping, but let me make a minor Senate/filibuster point first: As I’ve written many times, those who want to reform the filibuster tend to overlook the two key problems of a filibuster-less contemporary Senate. First, it would still be malapportioned. Second, it would almost certainly function like the House,...
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Here’s Ed Kilgore, today, on the filibuster: I’m among those who really get upset when people sort of internalize the recent routine use of the filibuster by Republicans to create a de facto 60-vote requirement for doing business in the Senate, as though it came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. It didn’t....
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Jamelle Bouie: For years, liberals have argued that polarization his little to do with the Democratic Party—which they see as largely centrist—and everything to do with a Republican Party, which has moved far to the right since the 1970s. Recent research from political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have measured polarization and...
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I will be in Chicago for the rest of the week, attending the Midwest Political Science Association conference. Therefore, blogging might be lighter in the next few days. Or heavier. We’ll see. I would also like to take this opportunity to once again call bullshit on both the MPSA and the Chicago Cubs. If...
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Yesterday, over at The Monkey Cage, Andrew Gellman reprinted an email from a Daily Beast journalist who was asking what one thing social scientists wished most that the average voter understood. Here’s part of the email: So I’m curious: What is the one insight from political science, psychology, or behavioral economics that you most...
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Will Wilkenson: Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian but I don’t in part because I’m not one, but mostly because I suspect that accepting any such label dings my IQ...
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Andrew Gellman argues that political scientists are too skeptical about institutional reforms: I resist what I see as the occasional habit of political scientists to report a null effect and imply from that the conclusion that various reforms don’t matter or shouldn’t be done. This comes up here with term limits for judges and...
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Nothing  — and I mean nothing — better captures the DC chattering class at its speculative worst than the Veepstakes. And that’s saying something. It’s not just that most of the speculation is baseless. And it’s not that most of it is utterly inane. It’s that, from an electoral standpoint, it just doesn’t matter....
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Previous Venn Diagrams SCOTUS Antonin Scalia, 4/4/12 John Roberts, 3/30/12 Clarence Thomas, 3/29/12 GOP CANDIDATES Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11 Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11 Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11 Rick Perry, 12/23/11 Herman Cain, 12/25/11 Rick Santorum, 12/28/11 Ron Paul, 12/31/11
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One thing I didn’t delve into too deeply in my post reviewing the committee funding process was how committees spend their money. Let’s do that quickly right now. First off, you don’t have to leave your computer to check it out for yourself. You might recall that the Committee on House Administration (CHA) has...
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Previous Venn Diagrams SCOTUS John Roberts, 3/30/12 Clarence Thomas, 3/29/12 GOP CANDIDATES Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11 Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11 Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11 Rick Perry, 12/23/11 Herman Cain, 12/25/11 Rick Santorum, 12/28/11 Ron Paul, 12/31/11
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Yesterday, I discussed the explosion of inbound email to Congress, and some of its possible impacts, particularly the way it alters a congressional office’s representational relationship with citizens and potentially has a nationalizing effect on politics, because of the difficulty of filtering out constituents from non-constituents. I don’t want to make too much of...
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It’s no secret that the Internet has radically transformed the practice of legislative politics on Capitol Hill. Information is everywhere, and moves like lightning. And so I’m going to spend a few days writing some quick posts about one dimension...
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