Fruits and Votes

Comment (im)moderation

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 20:56:53 GMT

It has come to my attention that sometimes over the years the comment moderation function has been overly aggressive. It is not always clear why some comments get held in the queue. Sometimes it is due to having over some limited number of hyperlinks (no, I am not sure what that limit is). Other times it is completely mysterious.

Aside from the spam filter, comment moderation is almost never on, other than whatever level the default is for my blogging software.

I recently cleared a bunch of comments that I noticed in the queue. Some of these were rather recent, and some were up to five years old. So if a comment you posted some time ago never appeared, maybe it has now. Sorry it took so long!

If you ever post a comment and it does not appear, contact me and I will try to locate the comment and clear it. (See the “About” page of this blog for contact info if you do not otherwise know how to reach me.)

The US Supreme Court process is just very strange

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 18:07:47 GMT

It would be hard to exaggerate just how much the US model of supreme court has been rejected by the modern democracies of the world. On three dimensions, the US model is really rare: appointment procedure, tenure, and size. And, yes, we should be actively pursuing reform in all these dimensions.

I am going to reference the data in A Different Democracy, which covers 31 countries.

Countries that allow a popularly elected president to nominate, contingent on consent of a malapportioned second legislative chamber, with no extraordinary majority needed:

2 (Brazil, US)

(Two others are by president and 2/3 of senate: Argentina and Mexico)

Countries that provide life tenure to supreme court judges:

3 (Argentina, Denmark, US)

Countries with top court having fewer than 12 members:

7 (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, US)

Countries with all these characteristics: 1

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In general, other countries either require extraordinary legislative majorities (such as cases mentioned above) or involvement by non-partisan commissions. Many have terms of several years (usually longer than those of the elected bodies), although quite a few have retirement ages (usually 70 to 75, sometimes younger).

Parliamentary systems often have appointment by the cabinet, and while that sounds quite partisan, I am not aware of other countries that have such politicized appointments as the US has nowadays. There may be some clear reasons why executive appointment is not a source of controversy in established parliamentary democracies (to my knowledge), but I can’t claim to know what those reasons are.

It is noteworthy that presidential systems have mostly moved away from anything looking like the US model, and for good reason. The processes that most resemble the US would be those of Argentina or Brazil, not normally countries Americans want to consider peers in terms of democratic process, but actually comparisons that are quite apt.

Italy assembly-size reduction: Cube root!

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:21:49 GMT

Based on the results of a referendum, Italy will be changing the size of its Chamber of Deputies from 630 to 400. By the cube root law (Taagepera, 1972) a country the size of Italy (around 60.5 million) should have about 392 seats in its first chamber. I’d say 400 is “about 392” and so this outcome is an obviously good thing.

Thanks to Matthew Bergman, Miroslav Nemčok, and Rein Taagepera for calling this to my attention. Rein also sent along an Italian newspaper article (PDF, a bit blurry) in which he was quoted.

The assembly reduction proposal was advanced by the Five Star Movement. As Rein said in personal communication, “sometimes populists get it right.”

Also, the Italian Senate is being reduced, to 200 (from 315, not counting appointed senators). I am not aware of any predictive model for how large a given second chamber “should be” but I note that in A Different Democracy, 2014, p. 214, we report that the mean second chamber in a unitary state is 0.53 times the size of the first chamber. So Italy is continuing to follow this pattern.

Tyranny of the minority

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 17:30:40 GMT

Excellent, succinct post by G. Elliot Morris about the fundamentally undemocratic (and, yes, unrepublican) nature of American political institutions.

Tyranny of the Minority

Despite what the founders intended, the Supreme Court is now fully able to be controlled by a significant minority of the country’s voters. Of course, it is not a popularly-elected branch of government, but there are costs associated with minoritarian rule that transcend the original intent of the founders.

[Excerpted from the post at Moriss’s blog]

Academics and journalists

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 17:26:53 GMT

This is such an interesting comment about academics and journalists by Andrew Gelman, in response to question as to whether he and Nate Silver might do a joint podcast or other discussion about election forecasting (Gelman says he’s asked and Silver has not responded):

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The more general question, maybe, is how journalists and academics can interact. A traditional model is that the academic does the research and the journalist writes about it. Or the academic does the work and the journalists writes about it with a critical eye, Felix Salmon style. A different model is that the journalist and the researcher are the same person: that’s what Nate [Silver] is doing. Maybe a better way to put this is that the “journalist” and “academic” roles have been erased and replaced by the analyst, who does both. Bill James was a pioneer in this. Finally, there’s the model in which the academics and journalists collaborate, which is what Merlin and I are doing with Elliott [Morris]. At this point, you might ask, why do Merlin and I need Elliott at all: why would a forecast by two political scientists be improved by a journalist? The immediate answer is that the Economist forecast is Elliott’s baby: he came to us to ask for help. The longer answer is that 3 people are better than 2, and the distinction between academic and journalist is not always so clear. I do a lot of writing, Elliott does a lot of programming, and we both have thought a lot about politics. I’ve found that collaboration almost always makes things better, as long as the collaborators can get along.

Anyway, Nate seems pretty set in his go-it-alone, don’t involve academic researchers approach, and I really like to collaborate, so maybe that’s one reason we’re having difficulty communicating.

Also, unrelatedly, Nate is a public figure and so he suffers from what I’ve called the David Brooks or Paul Krugman problem: he gets so much low-quality criticism from randos on the internet, that he’s developed a way of pattern of ignoring or firing back at criticism, rather than engaging with it directly. It can be hard to have a conversation, public or private, with someone who’s gotten into the habit of considering outside criticism as a nuisance rather than a source of valuable input.