The new politics of rent-seeking

Reihan Salam has an excellent article about the upper middle class that is sure to be a classic:

Another thing that separates the upper middle class from the truly wealthy is that even though they’re comfortable, they’re less able to take the threat of tax increases or benefit cuts in stride. Take away the mortgage interest deduction from a Koch brother and he’ll barely notice. Take it away from a two-earner couple living in an expensive suburb and you’ll have a fight on your hands.

The article identifies the upper middle class as the single biggest demographic cohort with a socio-economic position sufficient to benefit from political and economic rent-seeking. This is a powerful new way to understand how coalitions in our democratic policymaking apparatus sustain terribly sub-optimal policy over lots of issues. It's not that the upper middle class benefits materially the most from policies designed to protect and enrich interest groups. It's more about the qualitative difference that exists between benefiting from a subsidy and not. The distributive effects of rent-seeking aren't nearly as potent in driving political action as their absolute effects.

A political movement geared around opposition to rent-seeking has tremendous potential to unify disparate strands of liberalism and conservativism in the US, but unfortunately its feasibility is limited because it will require lots of upper middle class people to vote away subsidies that they benefit from.

The politics of mean reversion

The Upshot recently had a column discussing the role that occasional voters play in tempering the more partisan policy preferences of reliable voters. While I don't have strong views about the ethics of voting or nonvoting (although clearly its possible to vote well or vote poorly), I have a very hard time seeing the macro benefits of sporadic voting.

A popular idea in US politics is that we're too polarized. That's not really accurate: the electorate isn't more polarized, rather the institutional arrangements that translate votes into policy are badly skewed towards partisanship and gridlock. A key problem is that the basic system of accountability has degraded. Parties have become more ideologically coherent, which enables increasingly rational collecting strategizing. This is especially important in the senate, where any majority lacking 60 votes can be effectively blocked by the minority. The minority wins politically when the majority loses--and the minority has the institutional power to make the majority lose. Not exactly a recipe for dynamic government capacity.

Here's where sporadic voting comes in. To get anything done in this political reality, the mechanisms of government require a party to control 60 senate seats. But sporadic voters--who tend to be more independent--hold majorities accountable. In recent years the dysfunctional gridlock in federal government has led to a vast army of unsatisfied moderate voters ping-ponging back and forth between parties. Neither Democrats or Republicans ever quite assemble a coalition sizeable enough to truly implement their policy vision before being cut down by moderate voters for their ineffectiveness.

Cognitive style and public policy outcomes

Critics, including Green, like to satirize Obama's cool by comparing him to Spock. But Spock, though often played for laughs, was a damn fine officer. His clear thinking not only saved the Enterprise on countless occasions but was instrumental in brokering a historic peace accord between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

That is Matt Yglesias, defending Obama's cognitive style from the critics. Establishing a connection between policy outcomes and cognitive profile among presidents is very difficult. Unlike most lawmakers, presidents don't produce a neat, large dataset of votes that lends itself to causal analysis. What's more, factors like cultural and technological change produce qualitative differences in the political context that every president operates in. Isolating the causal effect of cognitive traits on policy outcomes might very well be impossible. But regardless, the post has some excellent points about media incentives and racial bias as well.

San Francisco's housing market is really screwed up

A few months ago Tech Crunch ran this fascinating, epically-long analysis of San Francisco's housing disaster. A taste:

Rent control is a naturally divisive topic in the tech community. Progressives view it as a sacred right that protects the remnants of a working- and middle-class in the city. “It’s a non-renewable resource,” Erin McElroy, who is part of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, explained to me. 

But the tech community is both socially liberal and market-oriented, with more than 90 percent of political donations from Apple and Google employees going to Barack Obama in the last election. So price controls in the name of community stability and equity just makes people’s brains explode.

There are numerous interesting nuggets and concepts packed into the report, but a big takeaway for me is just how strange the politics of land use are in most cities. Most cities are overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats, but there seems to be a huge opportunity for Republicans to naturally extend their governing philosophy and take a strong market urbanist position on these issues. The policy solutions are just waiting collecting dust.

Can we just ditch plurality-rule voting systems already?

It's been known for a while now that every voting system has fatal flaws. Most elections in the US use some 'first past the post' method, where the ticket winning a plurality of votes wins. This popular rule allows for some truly perverse outcomes where a block of voters' wishes is sliced up and a niche candidate--opposed by a big majority--wins the election. We see this possibility unfolding tonight in the New York lieutenant governor's race:

"The key problem for the governor is that Cuomo-Wu and Cuomo-Hochul would count as votes for different pairs, and would effectively split Cuomo's vote between two tickets. ... If the Cuomo-Wu and Cuomo-Hochul votes are split enough, though, the Republican nominee Rob Astorino — viewed as a long-shot contender — could theoretically sneak to victory with a small plurality.

This unlikely scenario would be a great example of the winner of an election being determined not by the electorate's vote but by the characteristics of the specific voting system being used. But the disturbing truth is that every election outcome is highly contingent on the voting rule in place, not just the attention-grabbing shockers. The only thing we can do is decide as a polis what voting system we want, and which sorts of groups we want to help and hurt. I for one support instant-runoff voting, or better yet the Borda Count, which both tend to mitigate plurality-rule's twisted logic somewhat and favor more moderate, consensus candidates.

RNC gets it right on a policy issue they have no power over

The Hill reports that the national Republican party is supporting Uber in its uphill struggle against corrupt regulation:

Republicans have promoted their support for the Silicon Valley start-up, hoping to attract more young voters to the party's free-market message. 

Earlier this month the RNC launched a petition backing Uber over "taxi unions and liberal government bureaucrats.”

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, protectionism in the 'drive people around in cars' industry is largely about local rules and regulations.

Francis Fukuyama Speaks

The creation of the U.S. Forest Service at the turn of the twentieth century was the premier example of American state building during the Progressive Era. Prior to the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, public offices in the United States had been allocated by political parties on the basis of patronage. The Forest Service, in contrast, was the prototype of a new model of merit-based bureaucracy. It was staffed with university-educated agronomists and foresters chosen on the basis of competence and technical expertise, and its defining struggle was the successful effort by its initial leader, Gifford Pinchot, to secure bureaucratic autonomy and escape routine interference by Congress. At the time, the idea that forestry professionals, rather than politicians, should manage public lands and handle the department’s staffing was revolutionary, but it was vindicated by the service’s impressive performance. Several major academic studies have treated its early decades as a classic case of successful public administration. 

Today, however, many regard the Forest Service as a highly dysfunctional bureaucracy performing an outmoded mission with the wrong tools. It is still staffed by professional foresters, many highly dedicated to the agency’s mission, but it has lost a great deal of the autonomy it won under Pinchot. It operates under multiple and often contradictory mandates from Congress and the courts and costs taxpayers a substantial amount of money while achieving questionable aims. The service’s internal decision-making system is often gridlocked, and the high degree of staff morale and cohesion that Pinchot worked so hard to foster has been lost. These days, books are written arguing that the Forest Service ought to be abolished altogether. If the Forest Service’s creation exemplified the development of the modern American state, its decline exemplifies that state’s decay.

Those are the first two paragraphs from his fascinating new essay, which everyone should read. His new book is out soon, a sequel covering political development from the French Revolution to modern times. I hope he includes plenty of discussion on posthumanism and the splinter neoreaction internet movement, but it will be excellent regardless.

Institutional Decay

Matt Yglesias reminds us that legislating through the courts is not the best way to govern in a democracy:

The conventional term for the paralysis of the legislative branch is gridlock. But while it's true that it's exceptionally difficult for a bill to become a law — the president can veto it, 41 Senators can filibuster it, a bare majority of the majority caucus in the House can prevent it from coming to the floor, and that's leaving aside all manner of committees and political delays — it's not the case that policy stops changing. The judicial branch, through its power of statutory interpretation, is constantly changing the lived-experience of American public policy even if the legislative text stays constant. 

And yet the judicial branch is not properly equipped to make broad evaluations of the policy merits of different approaches.

The idea of institutional drift and decay is not a new one, but it's super-important and deserves increased visibility as a cost associated with congressional dysfunction. Throughout the US' history, we've had periods of drift but also periods of renewal. Lately we've had mostly drift and not a lot of renewal.

Francis Fukuyama's spectacular essay The Decay of American Political institutions (somehow can't find an ungated version), is probably the best analysis on the topic, but Steven Teles' Kludgeocracy idea is also related and very important.

Do Ice Cream Trucks Have an Outrageous Regulatory Subsidy?

Photo Credit: http://reisman.lohudblogs.com/

Most food trucks and food carts quietly set up shop in some high-traffic public space to make money. Ice cream trucks seem to be unique in that they're constantly moving and travel deep into residential areas. Presumably the only way these strategies are lucrative is because ice cream trucks announce their presence with a loud ring or jingle.

But why don't we see more competition in these residential areas by other food trucks? I see two possibilities. One is that the rich history of ice cream trucks and their jingles makes them uniquely identifiable to residents. If a taco truck wanted to roll through neighborhoods selling food, how would they identify themselves to customers in their houses watching tv? The norms and precedence for mobile food trucks selling anything other than ice cream just isn't there.

This possibly explains everything, but I doubt it's the whole story. It's not hard to imagine some enterprising food truck blasting a variation of an ice cream truck jingle to train new customers, or even get an initial market foothold by copying an ice cream truck jingle just to get people out of their houses (bait-and-switch).

My suspicion is that there exist some regulations restricting the ability for non-ice cream food trucks to roll around residential neighborhoods selling food and blasting music. Most food trucks are highly regulated by cities in many ways. A few years ago Washington DC had a big fight over new rules governing where food trucks could park. Other cities around the country have faced similar battles pitting incumbent restaurants and other interest groups against the relatively weak food truck establishment.

In general most of these rules restricting food trucks are too stringent. Policymakers caving to the baldly bootlegger and baptist strategy from brick-and-mortar restaurants is silly, and NIMBY complaints from neighborhood groups or other local institutions is not sufficient cause to block these innovative small businesses.

But ice cream trucks actively disrupt neighborhoods with their loud music (many neighborhoods in New York City experience Mr. Softee trucks rolling past 5-10 times per day every day from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm). It's virtually guaranteed that the introduction of a new systemic nuisance like this would result in numerous law-enforcement complaints and local collective action to block the change to the status quo.

Implicitly (due to the lack of complaints or enforcement of nuisance laws) or explicitly (due to special regulatory exemptions), ice creams trucks have a protected market position. Now, the complaints of one sensitive local resident aren't enough to justify corrective policy action, but in the context of other paternalistic public health efforts (smoking bans, calorie-count requirements, restrictions on advertising to kids, etc.), taking a hard look at the social effects of ice cream trucks' special status seems reasonable.

The idea of a toxic food environment in most urban areas is pretty well-established, and the penetration of ice cream trucks (and the obesogenic food they peddle) into low-income residential neighborhoods with populations at high-risk for metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity is clearly damaging. The proliferation of online-ordering has leveled the playing field somewhat, but the psychological nudge of an ice cream truck loudly rolling up outside the house makes consuming this food that much harder to resist among willpower-depleted populations already struggling with health issues.

The Bitcoin Assassination Market Is Terrible. But What About This?

Ever since I read about the grotesque idea of a bitcoin assassination market, I haven't stopped thinking about its underlying mechanism, which itself isn't evil. The idea of anonymously crowdfunding an account that pays out under a specific circumstance, and only with blockchain unanimity is provocative, and might have some interesting applications.

Take political campaign contributions. The existence of widespread quid pro quo agreements between interest groups and lawmakers hasn't really been documented, but merely the appearance of corruption and dependency erodes trust in government and is corrosive to our democracy.

Most of the best solutions to the money-in-politics problem revolve around regulatory fixes (spending limits, increased transparency, decreased transparency etc.), but bitcoin 2.0 technology offers a potential band-aid that could marginally improve the incentives for certain politicians or policy issues.

It would not be difficult to imagine a bitcoin donations market whereby the first politician to come out publicly for some specific position would get paid. Or perhaps everyone on a committee voting a certain way on a bill would collect. State and local executives would be even more ideally placed to have their incentive structure modified by such a 'prize-for-action' scheme (their action-outcome link is tighter, and have less access to campaign funds than national figures). In many ways this conditional contribution approach is just a variation of the Kickstarter thing, but the specific mechanism of the blockchain makes it much more exciting.

Politicians Need More Procedural Freedom

David Plotz yesterday had an excellent column defending the general principle behind Chris Christie's underhanded tactics in the bridge scandal:

"But excessive hygiene is rampant in Washington. The controlling conservative wing of the Republican Party is addicted to principle. If politics is the art of compromise, we have a huge number of elected officials who are not politicians at all but rather zealots animated by ideology. This consistency, so admirable in a campaign ad, makes governing and legislation nearly impossible."

What he's really getting at is how our modern forms of intensive political journalism emphasize process over outcomes. The shift in political incentives away from deliberation has direct consequences for government effectiveness. Politics isn't merely the process of adding up the static policy preferences of lawmakers. Deliberation, strategy, logrolling, etc. all help to enable compromise legislation.

Another worrisome effect of process journalism punishing lawmakers for bad procedure instead of bad policy concerns the talent pool. In other electoral systems (and previously in the US) politicians were mostly judged on election day for their accomplishments. These days, however, politicians are evaluated constantly, and any tiny deviation from party orthodoxy is identified and punished. This may lead to a selection effect where most of our politicians are those who happen to have identities and policy preferences best fit to the current popular demands, instead of possessing intrinsic characteristics beneficial for governing. A snapshot analysis might suggest that super-responsive politicians are great (that's democracy, right?), but in a deeper, longer-term way these types might be less effective.

An Example of Good Government

Globalization and has exposed us to terrible risks
Photo Credit: improve.com

I tend to take a pretty cynical view towards government and the policy process in general, so it's important to highlight the occasional example of things going right. The FDA recently declared its intention to raise the cost-benefit bar for antibacterial soaps, forcing manufacturers to prove their health benefits.

Basic economic theory holds that when markets fail, government's role is to step in with a corrective. Classic examples might be antitrust rules (preventing monopolies), the Toxics Release Inventory (reducing information asymmetries between employers and workers), and taxes on alcohol (forcing prices to reflect the true social cost of goods).

Reducing the quantity of antibiotics floating around by making their production and distribution more costly is a perfect case of government action. Individual pharmaceutical firms don't have to bear the full social cost of increasing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so they produce more antibiotics than is optimal. The FDA is internalizing this externality. Although antibiotic-resistance is a problem in the here-and-now (reducing the efficacy of drugs), its real harm is to increase the tail risk of global pandemics. Such low-probability, high-impact events are often overlooked in public policy, so it's refreshing to see some action on this front.

Absurd Protectionism in the Sugar Industry is Great!

The Washington Post recently had a horrifying report on the domestic sugar industry, which through political influence has managed to establish itself as a resilient rent-seeking coalition. Government protection via price controls, import quotas, and loan guarantees raises prices, enriching manufacturers while hurting consumers and impoverishing foreign producers. It all sounds pretty terrible--your classic public choice dilemma, right?

While it's true that this regulatory kludge makes almost everyone worse-off by economic standards (real income, productivity, growth), I can't help but see a paternalistic silver lining to the status quo. The state of nutrition science is increasingly converging on the idea that sugar is astonishingly damaging to individual health and is a primary driver of the epidemic of metabolic syndrome and its associated ailments (obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's). While I haven't studied the elasticity of consumer demand for sugar, typically when you make something more expensive, you get less of it (though not always!).

The social and economic benefits of consuming less sugar are probably huge, and certainly under-appreciated. Having a healthy and vigorous citizenry is a virtue in and of itself, but also enhances the capacity of people to pursue and realize their own goals. A simple tax on sugar would be vastly more socially and economically optimal, but given the current sluggishness of our legislative branch, I'll take what we can get.

Judge Pushes Back Against Nuclear Waste Regulatory Kludge

The question of what to do with nuclear waste has long bedeviled policymakers and industry participants. The stuff has been stored on-site in temporary pools since the 1980s, but power companies have been steadily paying into a government fund to develop a long-term solution. Most of the money has been spent researching and building a proposed geologic repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which was cancelled by President Obama (a move undoubtedly driven by Harry Reid's clout and Nevada's early place in the presidential nomination process). It's an excellent example of kludgeocracy in action: no political majority exists to stake a risky position on changing the status quo, so we're left with an increasingly outdated and dangerous waste storage policy.

But in a rare move of governmental sanity, a federal judge ordered a halt to the collection of the storage tax:

"A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Energy Department must stop collecting fees of about $750 million a year that are paid by consumers and intended to fund a program for the disposal of nuclear waste. The reason, the court said, is that there is no such program."

An interesting question now is whether this development will help or hurt nuclear energy's competitive prospects. On the one hand electricity generated by nuclear fission becomes cheaper, albeit marginally. On the other hand, the industry finally loses all pretense of on-site storage pools as "temporary".

Nuclear energy exists within an insane regulatory thicket of competing and contradictory subsidies and hindrances. Action to combat climate change and institutional links to military research helps the industry. Conversely, the ban on waste reprocessing (established after India detonated a bomb built from reprocessed spent fuel) severely limits the creation of a safe nuclear energy industrial ecosystem.

Halting the storage tax is a small step towards simplifying everything, but it seems that until cheaply available space flight opens up a safe alternative to geologic storage and reprocessing (shooting waste into the vastness or sun), we're stuck with a situation that's becoming increasingly dangerous and unsustainable.

Important Thing To Remember About Foreign Aid

In reviewing an important new book in the popular literature about foreign aid, political scientist Chris Blattman makes a great point:

"Aid isn't a uniform mass. Deaton knows this, and my guess is he's talking about a particular kind of aid. I don't think he means emergency relief for disaster and conflicts. I don't think he means the money behind peacekeeping forces and post-war assistance. He might exclude child sponsorship. I'm guessing he's not talking about money spent on vaccine research in the West. He might even exclude support for elections and party-building and other democratization."

This nuance often gets lost in the marketing scrum surrounding foreign aid commentary, but is an important insight that critically reduces the issue's partisanship. Less partisanship over foreign aid allows coalitions to form that cut across the noxious Republican-Democrat divide. Novel and easily-changed coalitions allow good policy to be tested and scaled up, and bad policy to be eliminated quickly. The more the "foreign aid" concept is put into a simplified, homogeneous box, the easier it is for political entrepreneurs to employ it as just another weapon in our partisan total war.

Foreign aid should be understood as merely a convenient shorthand for all manner of social, economic, and political transfers occurring between countries of varying levels of development. Under this conception, issues not typically considered "foreign aid" would benefit from its relatively nonpartisan identity and moral seriousness (immigration), and also classic mechanisms of foreign aid might be better exposed as merely tools used by established political and economic interests to pursue their private goals (food aid, geopolitics).

Just as "regulation" can't simply be added up--some areas have too much regulation (occupational licensing), others too little (environmental degradation)--foreign aid encompasses effective resource flows and ineffective ones, depending on the goal. Only by being clear about what we're talking about for a given aid program or policy can we make real progress towards achieving a sufficient level of development for everybody.

Reducing the Costs of War Increases War

Photo Credit: The Guardian

The controversy in some circles over the U.S. government's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for military purposes often seems to miss a major point about the effects of new technology on warfare. Some military technologies, such as the atom bomb, dramatically raise the destructive capacity of a nation. Others, such as drones, dramatically lower the destructive impact of a military decision by radically increasing the target efficiency of a given action.

In other words, some technologies increase the costs of war (nuclear weapons) and others decrease them (drones). Unsurprisingly, corresponding incentive effects abound. The unthinkable horror of nuclear war has undoubtedly contributed to the relative peace among nuclear powers. On the flip side, emerging drone technology has made tiny, "surgical" military actions incredibly easy, resulting in tons of tiny, "surgical" military actions.

To some, drones are heralded as a humanitarian victory for the world: the vital risk to soldiers and pilots is reduced. Seen in a different light, the increased "variablizeability" (i.e. costless scaling) of war is ominous to the extreme. By crashing the domestic political costs of military action down to nearly zero, drones can potentially beat out other less-violent alternatives in foreign policy dilemmas, such as statecraft or economic sanctions. One even wonders if a simple "drone fix" might become the go-to policy choice of unencumbered politicians.

The key point here is that war is not simply a question of easily-quantified costs and benefits. The act of one sovereign state exerting coercive force over another has strong moral, psychological, historical, and cultural dimensions and associations. These other facets of war don't necessarily track with simple physical destruction: one bomb fired by a robot killing one person might nonetheless be interpreted as a grave moral and ethical affront to an entire society. It might just be a really good time to double-check our constitutional and bureaucratic procedures for authorizing the use of violence in foreign territory.

Conservative Environmentalism: It's Not Just About Ideology

The New York Times today has an interesting op-ed written by several former EPA administrators on the Republican case for climate change and the executive branch's capability for direct action in light of congress' legislative inaction.

Every time I hear calls for conservatives to embrace environmentalist public policy I'm struck by how logical it seems: conservatives support free- and well-functioning markets, the existence of environmental externalities prevents efficient markets, thus policy that corrects environmental distortions is conservative. Even the marketing angle is tight and clean: conservatives are the "stewards" of the free market, which necessarily implies being stewards of the earth. These logical connections are arguably superior to liberals' attachments to environmentalism, which are numerous, often complex, and always mushy (chemicals are evil, mountains are beautiful, etc.). In politics, simple messaging is the most effective. On this measure environmentalism should be squarely located within Republicans' policy wheelhouse. So why isn't it?

On this issue more than any other, the primacy of identity affiliation in politics is apparent. Political parties are coalitions, often tightly linked to logically consistent moral philosophies, but not always. Through a complex array of contingent historical and demographic factors, the Democratic party became affiliated with environmentalism and Republicans opposed (more on this in a future post). Today, one of the biggest forcing mechanisms holding this status quo together is social identity. Democrats signal their affiliation by supporting environmentalist social trends, policy, fashion, etc. Republicans oppose environmentalism for the same reasons--they don't want to affiliate with all those hippie bourgeois bohemians in cities.

Many of the arguments you hear on both sides of the aisle justifying the status quo in terms of the political parties' established moral philosophies are actually post-facto rationalizations with questionable logical consistency (more on this here). Consequently, the most exciting prospects for environmentalist policy action concerns the identification and manipulation of novel issue dimensions that can confound and muddle the existing Republican-Democrat stasis. Local issues can trump national party allegiance. Big business sectors with a rational interest in preventing climate change doom scenarios, such as property insurers, can leverage their existing links to pro-business Republicans to shift policy. Humanitarians concerned with rural poverty and malnutrition in developing nations can push for more R&D in genetically modified crops, appealing to bleeding-heart Democrats. The list goes on, but one thing is for sure: framing a "Republican environmentalism" is a nice soundbite but substantively next-to-useless in achieving real policy change.

Unbundling SNAP Makes Farm Subsidy Reform Easier

Photo Credit: heritageaction.com

Paul Krugman today ripped into House Republicans for voting to extend the terrible policy disaster of the farm bill while stripping funding for the food stamps program, SNAP. Although this move is by no means settled (food stamps could return in the Senate or conference process), Krugman's collection of factoids and jabs all seem spot-on in revealing the maneuver's perverse moral signal.

But if we take a step back from the symbolism and rhetoric, the potential decoupling of SNAP from the farm bill will likely result in better agricultural policy in the future. 

For one, food stamps aren't going anywhere. The program is incredibly popular with a broad beneficiary base; any serious attempt by Congress to eliminate it would result in massive spontaneous public outrage. Some Republicans speak of a desire to lump all welfare assistance together, run through a single committee. That would be great for institutional efficiency, but it makes liberals nervous by creating a single target vulnerable to marginal cuts. That's all irrelevant though--the likely outcome of a SNAP decoupling is Congress passing a targeted food assistance bill with Republican support, purchased with some other random policy concessions. Certainly not a great outcome, but understandable given the bargaining constraints of divided government.

The farm bill, by contrast, desperately needs an overhaul. In an age where most issues break across party lines, the ridiculous subsidies to wealthy farmers have found support from reelection-minded legislators representing rural districts. This is 'public choice 101': benefits flow to a small, intense group, while costs are vague and distributed. What's more, liberal lawmakers representing urban districts who should be voting against the regressive farm subsidies don't, because they need SNAP. 

So this decoupling will make urban lawmakers more willing to push for farm bill reform. At the very least it scrambles the calcified status quo, and raises the visibility of the issue. Even among rural lawmakers, tackling reform may be more palatable: there's surely some subset who vote 'yea' every time by electoral necessity, but privately understand that recent farm bills bear little relation to their original purpose of safeguarding domestic food security.

Explaining Myanmar's Political Reform

I've been noticing a lot of great coverage lately about Myanmar's rapid shift from isolated kleptocracy to nascent democracy, and what makes this democratization story different from other countries is the top-down nature of reform. Most of the prevailing theories in political science try to explain institutional shifts of this sort using incentives. Bottom-up revolutionary campaigns supported by the mass citizenry changes the calculation of leaders concerned with holding power, forcing them to offer public concessions in the form of better policy and political inclusiveness. Often incumbent-driven reform is an illusion: leaders are simply reacting to the ground shifting beneath their feet by cleverly preempting political change. When you do see a truly top-down reform process, it's usually driven by conquest. Think modern-day Iraq, or Japan after World War II.

What's fascinating about Myanmar is the seemingly complete lack of a good explanation for the junta-driven reforms unfolding today. It's not totally clear the leadership was preempting any structural shifts in the society or economy, and appeals to a unique Buddhist culture or a personality-driven account of change seem far-fetched. Clearly Myanmar's geography--nestled between India and China--means linking up with the global economy offers swifter and more certain rewards compared to isolated countries. And depending on where the benefits of reduced international sanctions and increased capital inflows accrue, it's possible that Myanmar's military leaders will be better off in a material sense. Still, the initial process that established a reform coalition at the highest levels of power remains a complete mystery and amounts to a fairly damning critique of incentive-based models of political leadership.

For more on the political science of leadership check out this short video summarizing Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's 'selectorate theory' or read The Dictator's Handbook.

Does Constituent Contact Matter?

One of the most fascinating aspects of professional blogging and social media use by academics is the incredible responsiveness of experts to random curious internet people. I asked a question about the effects of constituents contacting their elected officials on the premier political science blog, and was rewarded with two incredibly substantive posts on the topic here and here. It also sparked other knowledgeable people to contribute their information in the comments sections. In an age where many academic papers are consumed only among a small set of experts, blogging is an indispensable tool for digesting and popularizing all the good knowledge that's out there.