The Monkey Cage

I know all of you have been eagerly awaiting updates about the Dutch cabinet crisis I blogged about earlier. Well, here are some interesting recent developments. First, the most recent polls show that the PvdA (the red line in the graph below) continues to gain from resisting troop renewals in Afghanistan and forcing the cabinet crisis. The party has won nearly 10 seats in the pollls since the crisis.

Second, and more puzzling, two of the politicians who stood to gain most from these developments have decided in the last two days that they need to spend more time with their families (see also here). PvdA leader Wouter Bos, who was much beleaguered before the crisis but came out of it the undisputable leader of his party, made the announcement today. This follows a similar announcement by Camiel Eurlings, who was seen as the crown prince for current prime minister Balkenende.

Third, the recent polls and local election results imply that the prospect of Geert Wilders’ PVV becoming the largest party is a realistic one. In the Netherlands, the largest party almost always delivers the prime-minister. Speculation on what this would mean will have to wait until another blog post. In the mean time, go read why Daniel Pipes is enthusiastic about it and even calls him “the most important European alive today” while Ian Buruma is a little less impressed with Wilders.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome this guest contribution by Silja Haeusermann of the University of Zurich. Silja is also a contributor to the new Poli Sci Zurich blog, where this election report is cross posted. Very dedicated readers of the Monkey Cage may also note that this is our first election report on a referendum. I have not been listing referenda in my call for guest posts on elections, but anyone interested in writing on a referenda should feel free to get in touch with me as well.

Learning the hard way?

It is well known that there are people who actually like getting slapped – but it is puzzling to discover such a penchant with the right-wing parties and business organizations in Switzerland. Or then it must be some mixture of naïveté and stubbornness that makes them impermeable to learning any lesson from past failures. The latest slap is the massive (almost 73% of the votes) rejection of occupational pension cutbacks at the polls, in a direct democratic referendum that took place this Sunday March 7th. The result is a downright triumph for the left and trade unions – especially in a country where the combined Left (Social Democrats and Greens) gained less than 30% of the votes in the last national parliamentary elections .

However, the result of the referendum is not at all surprising to anyone familiar with welfare politics in Switzerland (and – for that matter – OECD democracies in general). And it is not – contrary to what the conservative newspaper NZZ, business leaders and right-wing politicians try to argue – the result of a confusing campaign, a “momentary state of uncertainty” among voters or their “denial of reality”. A denial of reality seems rather to be prevailing among the right, which pushed this proposal through parliament and into to direct democratic circus maximus. Indeed, the result of the referendum is exactly what we would expect in the light of the past 15 years of research on welfare politics in the age of austerity. Here’s why.

In the 1990s, Paul Pierson made a huge impact in the field when he explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate. On this basis, he predicted policy stability. More recent research, spearheaded by Swiss political scientist Giuliano Bonoli , proved him wrong by demonstrating that reforms could be achieved, under the condition that governments combine cutbacks with elements that benefit the most precarious social groups, mostly low-skilled, young and female voters. In a book that will be out with CUP this month, I have shown that this kind of “package deals” has become a necessary condition for successful pension reforms over the last 20 years, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, France and other European countries. The 2003 reform of the pension scheme in Switzerland, for example, did combine the same kind of occupational pension cutbacks that were rejected on Sunday with more generous protection of low-income earners. This combination led to a two-dimensional reform space that allowed for a very broad support coalition among parties and interest organizations of both the left and right (all actors in the green ellipse). The Swiss Union of Trade Unions SGB (the only actor consistently critical of the reform package) had learnt in earlier campaigns that it would be hardly possible to win a popular referendum all on their own, with part of the left supporting the reform. Hence, it refrained from challenging the 2003 proposal in a referendum and the reform could be enacted.

Continue reading "Learning the Hard Way? The March 2010 Swiss Pension Referendum" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now this is how how voting is done:

So instead of being recorded as absent, the council members have a technological fix: The chamber’s voting software is set to automatically register each of the 15 lawmakers as a “yes” unless members deliberately press a button to vote “no.”

The “yes” votes then flash on video screens throughout the chamber — and are placed in the clerk’s official record — even when members have left to grab a snack in the hall or hold a meeting.

It gets better.

Last year, for example, Alarcon made concurrent meetings so routine that he scheduled them on his official appointment calendar to coincide with the council’s regular 10 a.m. public sessions. The calendar showed he had appointments planned during 57 council meetings last year.

And better!

The rules of the council state that members must activate their own voting machines and must be within the council chamber to be counted as present. But the city attorney who advises the council said his office has defined the “chamber” to include the back rooms, bathrooms and news conference area, all of which are out of public view.

More is here.

[Hat tip to John Balz.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Short answer: they self-segregate. Or such is the finding of a newly published paper by Henry, Eric Lawrence, and myself. Find it here (gated) or here(ungated pdf). (See also these earlier posts). Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers.We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times had an interesting story a few days back on the improvements Google has made on its translation tools. The triggering event was a message by a Korean fan who wrote that Google was his favorite search engine, which the translate engine transformed into: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” Since then, the improvements have been vast and so are the potential implications:

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

This made me wonder whether the translate engine has already become a useful research tool for scholars of comparative and international politics. I don’t think an automatic translation tool can ever fully replace knowledge of languages but perhaps it is able to provide a quick sense of what’s going on in a foreign place. As the article puts it:

Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people. “If you need a rough-and-ready translation, it’s the place to go,” said Philip Resnik, a machine translation expert and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My first experiment was not very encouraging. I was curious about the response to Real Madrid’s elimination from the Champions League last night after spending record amounts on high profile players. According to Google Translate, the Madrid coach Pellegrini said he will quit his job (see also here), whereas the Spanish version says the opposite “No voy a renunciar a mi puesto.”

I would love to hear some experiences of researchers with more political texts. My first thought is that it might be a useful way to take a first cut at documents in languages one reads slowly but that it is not (yet) a tool that is ready to be applied to languages one doesn’t understand at all.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In my intro class yesterday, we began a discussion of presidency and I noted that presidents face the challenge of leadership: they confront high expectations even as the Constitution affords them little formal power. (How they have accumulated power in other ways comes later.) As evidence for high expectations, I noted how much the media focus on the president and, in doing so, perhaps exaggerate the extent of presidential power — a point I’ve discussed before. To illustrate, I put together this montage of Time covers from the 2008 campaign and the Obama presidency.

Posted by John Sides at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The “UNR Students for Liberty” held a rally Monday, full of pizzas, ponies, balloons, bouncing castles and music.

The goal of the rally was to abolish the ASUN, by collecting signatures to put on a petition for next year’s election. They say the student body is wasteful and takes money from students, an estimated $5 per credit.

“We feel those funds are stolen,” Barry Belmont with the Students for Liberty said. “They are forcing kids to pay and in essence, taking the money from them.”

The ASUN actually paid for the rally. The “Students for Liberty,” a recognized club, filled out all of the required paperwork to receive funds. Monday’s rally cost an estimated $3,000. They say they spent nearly $1,000 alone on pizza.

More is here.

[via Inside Higher Ed]

Posted by John Sides at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve only met Eliot Spitzer once, back when he was the state Attorney General. I was part of a group presenting the findings of a study of racial patterns of police stops in the city. (See here for a writeup of our findings.) Spitzer asked a few questions during the meeting, and I was impressed by his intelligence. Maybe that’s how people feel after meeting Bill Clinton, I dunno.

Recently, I had an opportunity for another interaction with Spitzer, this time indirectly, when Sarah Binder, John Sides, and I wrote a brief discussion of an article he wrote in the Boston Review on government’s proper role in the market. Spitzer argues for a clearer definition of the role of government as a setter and enforcer of rules in the financial marketplace; as he puts it, “even though private companies compete, only government can ensure that there is competition. Everybody in business wants to be a monopolist. There’s nothing wrong with wanting more market share. That’s how you make money.” He has lots of good stories:

When an investment bank does an IPO, and the IPO is hot—the stock is going to jump on that first day of sale—they give some of these hot stocks to the CEOs of their clients. Why? To keep them happy, so they stay as clients. As attorney general I said that should not be permitted; it violates the fiduciary duty of the CEO to the company. If the investment bank wants to give away something of value to keep a company as a client, it should give it to the shareholders, not the CEO. There’s an uglier term for spinning: commercial bribery. In 2002 we negotiated a global deal and outlawed it. People got outraged. One extremely powerful regulator today, a Peter-Principle-on-Steroids survivor, asked me then, “Don’t CEOs have any rights anymore?”

Spitzer makes a pretty convincing case that the current system (in which rich dudes pass multibillion dollar favors back and forth to each other) isn’t good. I mean, sure, we all help out our friends, but I think there’s a difference between giving your brother-in-law the contract for paving your parking lot, and these big-money financial deals.

I think the conservative argument against Spitzer’s position would be that, sure, it would be great to have an impartial referee but that, realistically, the government is itself a special interest, and that in the economic realm businesses might need more protection from the government than from each other. I’m guessing that, in response to this particular argument, Spitzer might say that, yes, government corruption (or simply inefficiency or even well-meaning but obstructive regulations) are indeed a concern, but that such concern can best be addressed by more clearly defining the role of government intervention in the financial system, rather than by first denying such a role and then rushing in with the occasional trillion-dollar bailout.

Continue reading "My second interaction with Eliot Spitzer" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sanjay Srivista draws some interesting connections between a recent Obama speech and a paper by P. E. Tetlock published in a psychology journal in 1981 (!). In general, I think we as political scientists don’t interact enough with research in psychology.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Monkey Cage does not endorse political parties, programs, candidates etc. I nonetheless suspect that John Scalzi’s proposal is one that everyone could get behind.

I’m generally not one for overbearing government regulation in entertainment, but if someone were to introduce legislation requiring home entertainment companies to have a “just play the damn movie” button at the start of every DVD, Blu-Ray or any other future movie-playing technology, I would call my Senators and representative every fifteen minutes until they voted “yes” on that bill. That is all.

Posted by Henry at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I claim the interesting version of the game for Democratic Representatives in conservative districts is Chicken.

So says Sandeep Baliga in this post at Cheap Talk (via Marginal Revolution). It’s a nice game-theoretic analysis of the (probably?) impending health care vote, focusing on conservative Democrats. Here is one interesting bit:

But there is a symmetric equilibrium where each conservative Rep’s strategy is uncertain [NB: “Rep” is representative, not Republican]. They might vote for it, they might not. There is no implicit or explicit coördination among the voters in this equilibrium. This equilibrium is bad for Obama. Sometimes lots of people vote for the bill and it passes with excess votes. But sometimes it fails.

One implication: if the representative wants to extract concessions from the Democratic leadership, it’s thus a good idea to signal uncertainty or even opposition to the bill — as many conservative Democrats have done. This raises the possibility, as one friend noted to me, that the prevalence of these signals in news stories may inflate the perceived chance that health care reform will fail in the House.

Posted by John Sides at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times hypothesizes about the reasons for indie-film dominance at the Academy Awards.

After last year’s Oscar show, executives from several major studios complained that their contenders had been run through a grueling awards campaign at great cost but with no real hope of winning. The independent “Slumdog Millionaire” had been a virtual lock from an early point. That plaint is not likely to disappear after Sunday’s proceedings. … Over the last decade the voting membership of the Academy has skewed increasingly toward indie- and foreign-based filmmakers. That is because revised admissions rules strongly favor Oscar nominees over the kind of Hollywood old hands who were once a shoo-in for admission. As smaller films got a footing in the awards over the last few years, those who made and appeared in them became voters, increasing the tilt toward little movies.

Posted by Henry at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This post on the background to Greece’s economic problems from the Economist’s Charlemagne is both very interesting and surprisingly non-Economisty.

The Greek civil war, and the bloody score-settling that followed, is a living memory for many Greeks. Any consideration of Greek nepotism or clientelism needs to be seen in that light. So for example, it is not enough to say that Greek civil servants enjoy jobs for life, and that is a big problem. (Though it is a big problem, not least because many Greek civil servants are paid pitiful wages—partly because there are so many of them. That means they will resist austerity measures all the harder, because they feel like victims in this crisis, not fat cats.) But the bloated public sector is also a function of history. Here again, is a commentary from Kathimerini:

The vast majority of Greek civil servants and others working in public enterprises are guaranteed lifetime employment. This practice arose from the country’s recent past, when any new government coming to power would fire the employees hired by its predecessor and replace them with its own supporters. Unfortunately, immunity from dismissal has been abused and simply offers hundreds of thousands of employees shelter from changing economic conditions

… Newspapers here in Belgium talk all the time about the government needing to “buy social peace” by paying off some interest group or other. In Belgium, the alternative to “paix sociale” is a strike. In Greece, plenty of grown-ups remember when the alternative to social peace was their neighbour, or their loved-one, vanishing in the night into a jail cell or worse. The current clientelist truce between right and left is the price (albeit a horrible, wasteful price) established for the current version of social peace enjoyed in Greece.

I am not an expert on Greek politics, but this strikes me as a highly plausible explanation, and one that is very clearly compatible with the emphasis that Adam Przeworski and others lay on credible commitment problems in new democracies. One of the most urgent tasks for those who would like to build a sustainable democracy is to ensure that credible commitment problems are solved - most basically, that (a) power will alternate according to election results, and (b) that disgruntled losers won’t take to the hills with their Armalites. Laying the foundations for these credible commitments is not always a politically pretty process, and leads to various inefficiencies (see also the Austrian Proporz system. But - as Charlemagne notes - it surely beats the alternative.

Posted by Henry at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy magazine. Subtitled “Five things you think are true that are.”

Others on this blog are far more qualified than I to evaluate these claims, but I have to admit that I find this sort of frank anti-contrarianism refreshing. I also like that Keating is evaluating the claims, rather than merely reporting the conventional wisdom as some kind of game, as in Newsweek’s notorious “conventional wisdom watch” feature.

P.S. Here are the five pieces of wisdom, along with Keating’s pithy summaries:

1. The Iraq war was a mistake. (“The bottom line is that thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars were spent to turn one admittedly barbaric dictatorship into a semidemocracy addled by sectarianism and extremist violence. Doesn’t seem worth it.”)

2. Iran wants nuclear weapons. (“Although international negotiators have several times offered to allow Iran to develop a civilian nuclear program so long as its uranium is enriched abroad to ensure it is not weaponized, the Iranians have continually refused. . . . Experts say the centrifuge at Qom is too small to be used for power generation but would be large enough to enrich uranium for military purposes.”)

3. Putin still rules Russia. (“He may talk the talk, but Putin still seems to be calling the shots. . . . No wonder more than 80 percent of Russians see Medvedev’s tenure as a continuation of Putin’s rule.”)

4. No peace ahead in the Middle East. (“[Bill] is right that there will never be a better time than now to strike a deal, but that has arguably been true since Israel was founded and the circumstances just keep getting worse.”)

5. China is rising. (“It might be true that China may not be able to keep up its astronomical growth rates forever, particularly with an aging population, and that it may never reach U.S. income levels, but this seems an odd quibble for a country that pulled 400 million people up by their bootstraps in 20 years in the greatest defeat of poverty in world history.”)

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brendan Nyhan links to this hilariously bad graph from the Wall Street Journal:

It’s cute how they scale the black line to go right between the red and blue lines, huh? I’m not quite sure how $7.25 can be 39% of something, while $5.15 is 10%, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation . . .

Follow the above link for more details. As Brendan notes, the graph says essentially nothing about the relation between minimum wage laws and unemployment (“Any variable that trended in one direction during the current economic downturn will be correlated with the unemployment rate among teens or any other group.”) and he also helpfully graphs the unemployment trends among the general population, which has a similar upward trend.

This is not to say that increases in the minimum wage are necessarily a good idea—that’s not my area of expertise. I’m talkin here about a horrible graph—all the worse, I fear, because of its professionalism. The above graph looks legit—it has many of the visual signifiers of seriousness, looking similar to a newsy graph you might see in the Economist, rather than like a joke graph of the sort identified with USA Today and parodied so well by the Onion.

P.S. I have no problem with the use of a crisp graph to make a political point; see for example here or here.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In response to the many recent discussions of the use of reconciliation both on this blog and elsewhere, Columbia University professor Gregory Wawro sends along the following guest post. It’s a tad bit long by Monkey Cage standards, but well worth the read:

Following up on Sarah Binder’s excellent posts on the reconciliation process and health care reform, I felt compelled to address some issues that have arisen over the past week, especially with regard to Republican’s attempt to equate the use of reconciliation with the nuclear option. Although Democrats have responded by spinning reconciliation as majority rule, pulling off the passage of health care may require parliamentary maneuvering similar to that which constitutes the nuclear option.

First off, it is inaccurate to equate reconciliation with legislating via simple majorities—especially for the purposes of keeping score as to how parties have used reconciliation in the past. Some in the media have assumed or asserted that the use of the process invariably means the legislation has been adopted by simple majorities (e.g., see this excerpt from an MSNBC “fact check” on reconciliation).

Here is some data on final roll call votes in the Senate on the twenty-two reconciliation measures that passed between 1980 and 2007. Only nine of these measures passed with fewer than 60 votes, and three of those nine did not become law because of successful vetoes. It is entirely possible that there is a bandwagon effect here and that senators who would have voted against the legislation voted for it once it became clear that the legislation was going to pass. Still, some of the margins here are so wide, that it’s hard to believe that a bandwagon
effect explains all of what is going on.

That said, it is clear that reconciliation has been used in some circumstances to enact legislation that otherwise would not have been passed if 60 votes had been required. And this brings us to the question of the technical and political feasibility of using it to pass health care reform in the current Congress.

The history of reconciliation has been one of innovation. In several instances, reconciliation has been used in ways that it hadn’t been used in the past, and in ways that arguably were not envisioned by the framers of the Budget and Impoundment Control Act. The use of reconciliation to pass health care reform in the 111th Congress will also be innovative in important respects, but success will probably require a committed majority to be willing to use some parliamentary strong-arm tactics to reshape the reconciliation process in areas where the rules are not entirely clear on what is and what is not permissible.

Continue reading "Nuclear Reconciliation" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This preview of a documentary on an election campaign for Class Monitor is fantastic and well worth your two minutes. I suspect this will find its way into many classrooms as it contains all kinds of lessons about institutions, corruption, and democracy.

h/t Chris Blattman where you can also find more on how to watch the full documentary.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is the newest addition to Sherry Zaks’s pantheon of social science-as-cake: King, Keohane, and Verba’s Designing Social Inquiry, aka “KKV.” For her previous work, see here and here. I think she should open up a stand at APSA.

Posted by John Sides at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The rumor du jour, that John Roberts was about to resign for health reasons, stems from a joke played by a Georgetown law professor on his class, according to Above the Law. The joke served a pedagogical point about informants and their sources. The whole thing is a fascinating tale of how quickly misinformation gets disseminated and taken as fact.

Meanwhile, in my American politics class next week, we’ll be discussing the presidency. If any rumors about Barack Obama’s physical well-being emerge at, say, 2:30 pm on Tuesday, I know nothing about them.

Posted by John Sides at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In a newly published article, Jason Lyall notes a puzzle. On the one hand, democracies are presumed to be bad at fighting counterinsurgency wars:

It is commonly argued, for example, that democratic publics are cost-intolerant and highly casualty-sensitive, especially if the war turns protracted, Voters are also thought highly responsive to spectacular attacks that, when amplified by a democracy’s media freedoms, can shift voting patterns while enabling insurgents to fan the flames of public dissent over the war’s course. Indeed, terrorists have targeted democracies with disproportionate frequency. Democratic leaders, held accountable to their publics through the specter of electoral defeat, are thus constrained in their ability to wage war, resulting in higher and faster rates of defeat than those attained by autocratic states.

But they’re supposed to be good at fighting conventional wars for these same reasons:

What makes the apparent ineffectiveness of democracies so puzzling is that these same attributes—namely, rational publics, accountable leaders, and open media—are cited as responsible for democracies’ unmatched success rate in conventional wars. Democracies have won a staggering 93 percent of the interstate wars they initiated since 1815, a trend due largely to democratic leaders choosing to fight wars only when the odds of victory are high.

Using a new dataset and research design, Lyall finds that being a democracy has no effect on the likelihood of winning a COIN war or on the duration of the war. Other factors are more important:

It appears that prior studies have conflated the risks of occupation with the risk of being a democracy; while democracies are much more likely to be external occupiers than are comparable autocracies, it is the act of occupation itself, rather than the fact of being a democracy, that is most influential in shaping war duration…

…emphasizing battlefield dynamics — the “how” of fighting may prove a better theoretical bet than focusing on regime-specific variables — the “who” of fighting!+ Indeed, the degree of a military’s mechanization, its status as an external occupier, and the level of material support for insurgents all proved more consequential for explaining outcomes and duration+ In short, democracies do struggle to defeat insurgents—but not because they are democracies.

An ungated copy of the paper is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

According to Politico, Republicans are worried that the Senate parliamentarian, who potentially plays a major role in reconciliation, is too close to the Democrats. This working paper by Tony Madonna shows that historically, the Senate parliamentarian has been non-partisan in the application of rules and procedures. Here is the abstract.

Scholarship on the United States Senate has demonstrated the pivotal role the presiding officer can play when asked to interpret the chambers’ rules and precedents. This study evaluates factors that influence the presiding officers’ decision-making when such questions arise. I find that partisanship was a significant influence in early senates. However, the emergence of a formal parliamentarian in the 1920s served to decrease informational asymmetries within the chamber, leading to a non-partisan application of rules and precedents.

h/t Jeff Jenkins.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote the previous post on UN peacekeeping as this was something I used to track closely but haven’t followed in the past five years. I was struck by the numbers as I gathered some graphs for teaching the other day. Holger Schmidt, who knows much more about this topic than I do, wrote to point me to two interesting papers that offer a much more systematic analysis of recent trends. The first, a 2009 article (gated) in the Journal of Peace Research by Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams, shows that Western countries engage in quite a significant amount of peacekeeping but for various reasons prefer to do so outside the UN framework. The second, a preliminary working paper by Jim Lebovic presented at the 2010 ISA conference, shows how patterns of contributions have shifted markedly in the second wave of post Cold War UN peacekeeping. Abstracts are below the fold.

Continue reading "More on UN Peacekeeping Contributions" »

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As of January 2010, there were 99,943 UN peacekeepers active in 15 missions around the world. This is a record as the graph below shows (from globalpolicy.org).

The resurgence of UN peacekeeping after 1999 has been a bit under the radar screen. Below are the major troop contributors. Funny list, no? The UN reimburses a standard rate per soldier regardless of country of origin, making participation relatively attractive to poorer countries. There are also some interesting competitive regional dynamics going on in South Asia. Many of these countries have internal security problems. I bet someone at the Pentagon has looked at this list and wondered why Pakistan doesn’t use these 10,826 soldiers to go after the Taliban. Also notice China in the top 15, as the only P-5 member. That’s a very novel development. The U.S. isn’t in there but the US military does provide essential support to various peacekeeping missions. 96 peacekeepers have been killed already this year. Wonder why Western democracies aren’t high on the list?

Update: Here is more analysis of who sends troops by my friend and former colleague Jim Lebovic and a more recent paper by Richard Perkins and Eric Neumayer. They find that democracies are more likely to contribute and that states are more likely to contribute to missions in the same region or in a former colony.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Justin Logan has a go at Andrew Exum for suggesting that political science has little that is useful to say about the conduct of war.

I think Exum’s views are probably common in DC, so this could work as a forum for discussing part of what I think is wrong with the DC policy debate. Take, to start, Exum’s suggested pledge that “War is a human endeavor. I recognize that it is a phenomenon that does not conform to neat mathematical equations,” and set it in the context of another one: “I recognize that very few squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division have ever taken a course in statistics yet probably know more about the conduct and realities of war than I do. ” The first claim is about modesty: social science is not the same as physical science. … If what Exum is getting at here is a claim like “quantitative scholars can be arrogant and oversell their research,” then Amen. But his second claim lionizes squad leaders in the 10th Mountain Division as superior in knowledge to social science researchers. I find this juxtaposition very odd, and I think it’s basically a rejection of social scientific principles in general. … It just isn’t true that inducing inferences from anecdotal experience produces better explanations/predictions than do people who have larger universes of cases and can control for various factors. Exum seems to support an approach to theory-building in which one directly observes facts and then induces theory based on those observed facts.

Continue reading "COIN and selection effects" »

Posted by Henry at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)