Why Ted Cruz Needs to Trust Republicans

by John Sides on May 22, 2013 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Legislative Politics

The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans. Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this mess.

So said Ted Cruz today.  This is not the first time he’s run afoul not only of Democrats—Harry Reid called him a “schoolyard bully” a few weeks ago—but also of his fellow Republicans, conservative allies (e.g., the Wall Street Journal editorial board), and others ostensibly on his side.  You can follow the links to various stories in this Ramesh Ponnuru piece.

Ponnuru, who has known Cruz for a long time, thinks his behavior is just fine.  Confronted Cruz’s violations of Senate norms, Ponnuru asks, in essence, “so what?”

The people of Texas didn’t vote for him because he promised to keep his head down in deference to his colleagues. No senator wins election that way. Presumably voters want senators who will be as effective as they can be in advocating for the views they campaigned on.

Maybe that’s a correct theory of the voting behavior of Texans, and maybe not.  Regardless, I don’t think Cruz’s problem is in Texas.

Cruz’s problem is that he may want to be president of the United States, reports the National Review’s Robert Costa.  And to be the Republican nominee, he’ll need the support of his Republican colleagues.  The 2012 election once again showed—and despite some skepticism—that it is very hard to win the nomination unless you’re preferred by a substantial chunk, if not the vast majority of, your party’s leaders (as was Romney).  Which is to say, it pays to be nice to your colleagues.  It’s no guarantee, of course: junior Senator Hillary Clinton kept her head down and played nice, and lost the nomination.  John McCain often irritated his fellow Republicans, but still mustered enough support within the party to win the nomination.

But nevertheless, Cruz’s strategy is risky.  Just ask Santorum or Gingrich, whose surges in the 2012 primary were met by deafening silence from GOP leaders (Santorum) or vigorous, on-the-record denunciations (Gingrich).

Ponnuru, for his part, acknowledges something like this:

Cruz’s Beltway critics were horrified anew last week on reports that he is thinking of running for president. If the past few months are any guide, he would try to build a majority starting with the most conservative end of the Republican primary electorate, and argue that the party needs to nominate a true conservative rather than an establishment favorite.

Many Republicans have tried this strategy since President Ronald Reagan left the scene. None has succeeded. The right end of the party invariably splits its support among several candidates, and voters in the middle of the party usually prefer someone with more experience than the right’s favorites.

Maybe Cruz has a different strategy in mind, or has a reason for thinking this time will be different. If he runs, he will have at least one thing going for him: He has a knack for making his opponents lose their wits.


Yes, “none has succeeded.” That’s a warning sign right there.  And the other warning sign is the reason why they haven’t succeeded, which is not quite what Ponnuru states.  It’s not that the conservatives can’t coalesce on a candidate and the middle prefers someone with “experience.”  It’s that many in the party are wary of nominating a strongly ideological candidate—a “severe” conservative, if you will—because they’re afraid that this candidate will lose in the general. And rightly so!  See Table 2 of this article (pdf) by John Zaller.

In 2012, as Lynn Vavreck and I show in The Gamble (pdf), only about half of Romney’s supporters were closest to him ideologically. The other half were closer to Gingrich or Santorum—that is, to one of the more conservative candidates.  But this other half also tended to believe that Romney was the only candidate who could beat Obama in November.  Their vote was about electability, not experience. Of course, Romney didn’t win, but Zaller’s finding suggests that a more conservative candidate would have done worse, other things equal.

Cruz’s path to the presidency—if he decides to run—must consist precisely of convincing “the middle” of the party that he’s electable despite the fact that he may be the most conservative member of the Senate (pdf).  To do that, he’ll need the support of his fellow party leaders to send that signal.  It doesn’t matter if he has “a knack for making his opponents lose their wits.”  His opponents will be busy nominating Hillary Clinton or whoever.  And it doesn’t matter whether, deep in his heart, he trusts Republicans.

What matters is whether he has a knack for making his fellow Republicans trust him.

[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore]

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The Sociology of Think-Tanks

by Henry Farrell on May 22, 2013 · 2 comments

in Blogs

This article in The Nation is likely to cause some considerable embarrassment to the Center for American Progress (CAP).

Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for 
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing. … Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to.
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2 comments

Special Prosecutors: Be Careful What You Wish For

by Andrew Rudalevige on May 22, 2013 · 0 comments

in Law,Presidency

There have been various calls in recent days for the appointment of an independent counsel to explore and expunge the IRS’s selective investigation of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status after 2009.

From the right, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal claims, for instance,that “we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.” If you can get past this cheap hyperbole (Ms. Noonan herself worked in a White House marked by a worse scandal, Iran-contra, and in 1998 she thought President Clinton deserved impeachment), her point is worth noting:

“Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business…. [but] what happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned.”


From the left, Bill Keller in the New York Times agrees: such an appointment would show the president truly takes any IRS wrongdoing seriously, he says, and “it’s the surest way to get answers the public might trust.” But most crucially, and here he intersects with Noonan, “The third reason for a special counsel is that the government has serious business to conduct, and the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction.”

This all sounds very high-minded (Noonan even denounces as “shameful and shallow” any effort by “any Republican operative or operator to…turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest.”  Keller one-ups her by calling for the appointment of Clinton nemesis Ken Starr to the post.)

But if we know anything about the history of special counsel investigations, it is that we know that they are not, in fact, either high-minded or apolitical. The investigation may be nonpartisan, but the effects are not. The sideshow saga surrounding the investigation of the “outing” of Valerie Plame during the Bush II years is sufficient to give one pause on this point; but ponder, too, of course, the investigations by Starr or Lawrence Walsh or the five other independent counsels at work during the Clinton years. (Wake Forest political scientist Katy Harriger’s book on the topic gives much more detail.)

In short, appointing a special prosecutor may be the right thing to do. But the idea that this would partition off the IRS scandal from the rest of Washington and allow some sort of ‘space for governance’ is very dubious indeed.

To be sure, the structuring of any given special investigation could differ; but Noonan and Keller both call for a broad remit and total independence. Along these lines it is worth remembering the 1988 Supreme Court decision Morrison v Olson. By a 7-1 vote (Justice Kennedy did not participate) the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Independent Counsel Act (ICA), part of the Ethics in Government Act, a post-Watergate reform package passed in 1978. The ICA allowed for an odd quasi-judicial/executive appointment power for independent counsels, and IC target Ted Olson (yes, that Ted Olson) argued this structure violated the separation of powers by buffering counsels from the presidential removal power (and also wandered into Article III by the creation of a separate court). The Court held these were permissible infringements given the broader governmental interest in promoting the public trust and fighting executive branch corruption.

Only Justice Scalia dissented from this finding, a dissent which provided both a full-throated defense of “unitary executive” theory” and, more crucially for present purposes, a prescient vision of the use of the ICA as political weapon:

“The context of this statute is acrid with the smell of threatened impeachment…. [B]y the application of this statute in the present case, Congress has effectively compelled a criminal investigation of a high-level appointee of the President in connection with his actions arising out of a bitter power dispute between the President and the Legislative Branch. Mr. Olson may or may not be guilty of a crime; we do not know. But we do know that the investigation of him has been commenced, not necessarily because the President or his authorized subordinates believe it is in the interest of the United States, in the sense that it warrants the diversion of resources from other efforts and is worth the cost in money and in possible damage to other governmental interests….


“How much easier it is for Congress, instead of accepting the political damage attendant to the commencement of impeachment proceedings against the President on trivial grounds—or, for that matter, how easy it is for one of the President’s political foes outside of Congress—simply to trigger a debilitating criminal investigation of the Chief Executive under this law…. Besides weakening the Presidency by reducing the zeal of his staff, it must also be obvious that the institution of the independent counsel enfeebles him more directly in his constant confrontations with Congress, by eroding his public support. Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that one’s opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, ‘crooks.’ And nothing so effectively gives an appearance of validity to such charges as a Justice Department investigation and, even better, prosecution….”


The brief filed in the Morrison case by three ex-Attorneys General, from the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations (Edward Levi, Griffin Bell, William French Smith) also seems apropos:

“[T]he institutional environment of the Independent Counsel—specifically, her isolation from the Executive Branch and the internal checks and balances it supplies—is designed to heighten, not to check, all of the occupational hazards of the dedicated prosecutor; the danger of too narrow a focus, of the loss of perspective, of preoccupation with the pursuit of one alleged suspect to the exclusion of other interests.”


Or, as Ted Olson himself put it, “If you are given a fishing license which has the name of a fish on it, and you don’t come back with that fish, you’ve failed.”

Certainly, in the present case, if there are criminal issues they should be investigated and charges brought. But simply calling someone a “special prosecutor” does not in itself cordon off a ‘safe space’ outside of which normal policy-solving political bargaining (if that’s normal now) can continue unaffected.  There are good reasons that the ICA was allowed to expire unceremoniously, with the blessing of both parties, in 1999.

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Final Free E-Chapter of The Gamble Is Available

by John Sides on May 22, 2013 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,The Gamble 2012

thegamble_cover_small


Lynn Vavreck and I are pleased to announce the next e-chapter of our book on the 2012 presidential election, The Gamble.  The chapter, “High Rollers,” is here (with a pdf link here) and on Amazon.

This chapter is the first of three chapters on the general election campaign.  It deals with the summer campaign, including the continuing importance of fundamentals like the economy and party identification, the candidates’ messaging strategies, Obama’s early advertising blitz, the attacks on and news coverage of Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, various “gaffes” (“You didn’t build that,” Romney’s foreign trip, etc.), and the Paul Ryan pick—basically everything up until the conventions.  You can see parts of that analysis previewed in my most recent post at Wonkblog.

Some findings from this chapter:

  • Economic conditions in the first half of 2012 still forecast an Obama victory.  Indeed, by at least one economic index, they were more favorable for Obama than for Clinton in 1996.
  • Despite concerns about “divided” political parties, Democrats and Republicans coalesced very quickly around Obama and Romney, respectively.  In general, party identification helped to create a great deal of stability in candidate preferences.
  • The various gaffes, as well as the attacks on Romney’s time at Bain Capital, produced at best small and temporary shifts in opinions.
  • News coverage of Obama and Romney during the summer was remarkably balanced.  The media favored neither candidate.  See the chapter for the data that support this claim.
  • The effects of advertising on vote intentions were visible but short-lived.  As I said at Wonkblog, we found no evidence that the early Obama advertising created durable shifts in opinion that would have benefited him on Election Day.
  • In the Pollster averages, Obama’s lead over Romney the day before the Republican convention began was exactly the same as it was on May 1.

We argue that the much of the general election campaign, especially in the summer, resembled a “dynamic equilibrium”:

The general election campaign resembles a concept from the sciences called a “dynamic equilibrium.” In a dynamic equilibrium, things are happening, sometimes vigorously or rapidly, but they produce reactions that are roughly the same size or magnitude and that occur at roughly the same rates. Thus, the entire “system”—populated by candidates, media, and voters—appears stable, or at a “steady state,” to use more scientific nomenclature. Reams of news coverage and vigorous campaigning coincide with stable polls.

The implication, then, is not that the Obama and Romney campaigns were ineffective.  It is that they were roughly equally effective.

The entire book is finished and will be available by late August or early September.  Stay tuned.

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Want Data on the Ideologies of 18,000 State Legislators?

by John Sides on May 21, 2013 · 0 comments

in Data,Legislative Politics

Here it is, courtesy of Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty.  Boris’s blog post about the data is here.  This is the first extensive data on the political views of state legislators.  Well worth digging into!

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NSF-sponsored research on deep interactions

by Andrew Gelman on May 21, 2013 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Methodology,Public opinion

As part of our series on recent NSF-funded political science research, Rick Wilson points to . . . Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman. (Forthcoming). “Deep Interactions with MRP: Election Turnout and Voting Patterns Among Small Electoral Groups.” AJPS [DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12004].

Rick writes:

Accurately measuring attributes of the American public is critical to the success of government and society. This includes polls that allow lawmakers to understand their constituents’ preferences to inform their policy choices. It is also indispensible for government to accurately measure unemployment or the population itself through the Census. Yet conducting and analyzing surveys is an increasingly difficult proposition, with the growing abundance of cell-phone-only populations, the difficulty in reaching certain segments of the population, and many other challenges. New measurement techniques need to be developed for the 21st century.

This research demonstrates that standard survey analysis methods are often unstable and unsuitable for estimating values for small populations. In turn the article introduces a statistical method that combines survey and Census information that overcomes these problems. This particular research focuses on vote preferences, but the method can be applied generally to survey analysis, and as such is valuable for any person or organization with an interest in accurately measuring aspects of the American public.

This work should be viewed as a statistical innovation driven by an interdisciplinary approach to research. In a world where “big data” are becoming increasingly available, there is a temptation to think that standard statistical and computational methods can be arbitrarily pointed at large piles of data to make sense of the world; this thinking implies that funding should only go to the hard STEM disciplines, which are traditionally better trained at handling these quantitative tasks. This research demonstrates that standard data-crunching approaches often miss important structures, or can be entirely inappropriate for the question being asked. The research makes clear that scientific progress is achieved through collaboration across disciplines, such as between technical experts such as statisticians and computer scientists, and domain-specific experts such as political scientists, education policy experts, medical researchers and the like.

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Video of the Roundtable on the 2012 Election, featuring Ezra Klein and Nate Silver

by John Sides on May 21, 2013 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Public Events


Here is a video of the roundtable I mentioned previously, which attracted a big crowd at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association back in April.  This was filmed with a Macbook positioned out in the audience, so the audio and video quality is not great.  I apologize for that.  But turn the volume up and you should be able to hear most everything.

To orient you, here is the line-up from left to right: John Sides (moderator), Larry Bartels, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Simon Jackman, Lynn Vavreck, and Drew Linzer.  The initial minute or so of the video—in which I introduced Larry—is cut off.  The video begins with my introduction of Nate.

After the introductions, the first question is asked first of Larry and then we move down the row, with each person chiming in—if that helps match voices to blurry faces.  For example, you’ll hear Nate wishing the 2012 election had featured a depression and a Gingrich nomination, Ezra saying that he learned not to mess with Nate, and Simon saying that we should “maintain our rage.”

This was a really fun and interesting conversation, and I thank all the panelists—and especially Nate and Ezra—for participating.

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Whither Nation Building? Lessons for Iraq, Syria, and Mali

by Joshua Tucker on May 21, 2013 · 1 comment

in Comparative Politics,Transitions

The following guest post is provided by George Washington University political scientist Harris Mylonas, the author of the recently published  The Politics of Nation-Building  (Cambridge University Press, 2013).  The post originally appeared at e-IR.

*****

In my book, The Politics of Nation-Building, I explore the reasons behind a state’s choice to assimilate, accommodate, or exclude ethnic groups within its territory.[1] I develop a theory that focuses on the international politics of nation-building arguing that a state’s nation-building policies toward non-core groups — any aggregation of individuals perceived as an unassimilated ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state — are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the interwar Balkans, I conclude that the way a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state’s foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group’s external patrons. However, as I admit in the book, this argument does not travel to states where the ruling elites are not motivated by a homogenizing imperative.

Some places in the world are run by core groups consisting of apparent minimum winning coalitions,[2] others by elites that go at great lengths to establish national states.[3] Why do some countries have leaders that try to make the national and the political unit overlap and others that opt to rule with a minimum winning coalition? One argument suggests that maybe the degree of diversity prevents the nation-building path in some cases, other arguments focus on the pattern of spread of nationalist ideology and/or the prevalence of competing ideologies such as communism, yet others put forth the importance of war-making and imitation of successful military tactics as a mechanism that accounts for the spread of nationalism and the nation-state system.[4] In The Politics of Nation-Building I build on some of these and suggest that the main reason that leaders adopt the nation-building option is the reality, or anticipation, of other powers using non-core groups in their state to undermine their stability or even annex parts of their territory.

The European story is well known and so are the interactions between the Russians and the Europeans. Tilly’s argument that war made the modern national state may be correct but it is also based on an understood reality: borders were constantly changing during the centuries that modern European states developed.[5] But the Westphalian principles have been adhered to more in some parts of the world than others.[6] Border fixity did not only vary tremendously over time but it also significantly varied crossnationally across the globe.[7] For example, following the Treaty of Berlin in the end of the 19th century the borders of Africa “froze” after the decision of the Great Powers.[8] This led to a completely different incentive structure for both ruling elites and counterhegemonic elites in countries with “fixed borders”. Beyond the case of Africa, however, we can point to other places with similar levels of border fixity that resulted from different geopolitical configurations, such as Latin America—the back yard of the USA—or the Middle East, where the colonial powers also left their mark on the demarcation of borderlines.[9]

Overall, areas that were part of a geopolitical configuration that guaranteed border fixity had less of an incentive to pursue nation-building policies. Within these cases the only countries that I would expect to see nation-building policies emerging involve cases where an external power (major power, regional power, neighboring state, diaspora group and so forth) attempted to cultivate a fifth column within their territorial boundaries. Moreover, it would not be surprising if this phenomenon of external backing of non-core groups would be less pronounced in regions where border fixity was perceived to be really high. However, this ‘equilibrium’ becomes more or less sustainable based on the structure of the international system and the ability—real and/or perceived—of regional actors to defy these geopolitical configurations I described above.

The crucial question today is: What is the future of border fixity in today’s world? More importantly, what is the perception of the relevant actors across the world with respect to this question? The list of border changes is longer than we want to admit. One just needs to cite former Yugoslavia and USSR;[10] but more recently we find cases beyond the traditional spaces where nation-building has already made its mark like Sudan.[11]Discussion of border changes has also emerged in the case of Iraq, Mali, and even Syria. It remains to be seen if any such plans will materialize. Granted the list of cases could have been much longer if nationalist principles were to be fully operative but this is not a satisfactory answer. Even if we only get a few dozen of the hundreds of border changes we would get based on nationalist principles, the reverberations will be felt globally. Moreover, such a situation would further push the spread of nationalism, encourage external involvement, and boost nation-building projects across these areas. We are already observing manifestations of this dynamic, but more border changes would certainly intensify it. This in turn will have the direst consequences for the well being of ethnic groups that are perceived as having ties with external powers that are perceived as enemies by core elites. Shi’as in various Sunni dominated states in the Middle East are a case in point.

What can be done? The International community can impact perceptions of border fixity by either investing resources in upholding the norm of territorial sovereignty or by promoting regional integration schemes around the globe that would indirectly guarantee existing borders and, according to The Politics of Nation-Building, would also lead to accommodationist policies. However, neither of the two solutions is sufficient without important investments in economic and political development.

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Does cellphone coverage make violence more likely in Africa?

by Henry Farrell on May 20, 2013 · 3 comments

in Comparative Politics

Jan Pierskalla and Florian Hollenbach argue that it does in a new article in the American Political Science Review.

Overall, our quantitative models demonstrate a clear positive association between cell phone coverage and the occurrence of violent organized collective action. This effect persists when controlling for a series of standard explanations of violence, as well as unobserved, time-invariant factors at the country and even grid level. Plainly, our results suggest that local cell phone coverage facilitates violent collective action on
the African continent.

This article should set off some interesting debates. I’ll leave it to those more statistically adept to assess their analysis (although I wonder whether the authors will get some pushback for their claim that regulatory efficiency is a good instrumental variable for cellphone coverage and is causally unconnected to levels of violence). Nonetheless, this piece does draw some interesting and potentially important connections between the diffusion of communication technology and ‘real world’ outcomes. As the authors note, we have seen a number of pieces over the last couple of years asserting that new communication technologies have helped e.g. foster the spread of the Arab Spring revolutions. However, we’ve seen precious little work that really tries to demonstrate systematic linkages rather than assert them. Pierskalla and Hollenbach’s piece begins to think about how we might want to investigate these linkages.

3 comments

How bad would the nuclear option fallout be?

by Sarah Binder on May 20, 2013 · 2 comments

in Legislative Politics,Senate procedure

Following up my early morning nuclear option post …

I appreciate Jon Bernstein’s nuanced and thoughtful response on the credibility of minority party threats to go nuclear were the majority to employ the nuclear option.  He asks the critical question:  “After majority-imposed reform is imposed, does it makes sense to carry out that threat?”  Jon’s skepticism here is well-taken.  Still, it’s remarkable how few majorities have been willing to consider taking the gamble.  Frist and many of his fellow partisans in 2005 seemed ready, but they are nearly an historical anomaly.  I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that the GOP would not actually have to blow up every bridge to impose a steep cost on the majority party’s agenda.  With apologies for quoting at length, this is how we put it it back in 2007:

Why would the threat of minority obstruction out weigh the majority party’s threat to reform-by-ruling? The minority is not helpless. If the ruling is limited to judicial nominations, as former Majority Leader Frist insisted in 2005 that it would be, the minority could filibuster any other debatable measure in anticipation of a Republican move to bring up a controversial judicial nomination. They could object to routine unanimous consent requests, which would require the majority instead to adopt a routine motion or even force the majority to secure sixty votes to impose cloture. If used widely, such moves could radically slow Senate action on all matters, a majority leader’s worst nightmare. The minority’s leverage under existing Senate rules and practices seems to counter the majority’s technical ability to go nuclear by reinterpreting existing chamber rules via new precedents.

Hard to know for sure how much to discount a counter-threat from the GOP.

Also, Richard Arenberg—co-author, with retired Senate parliamentarian Bob Dove, of Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate—weighs in on the nuclear option here with some interesting detail and perspective.  I think his third point is worth highlighting in particular, as it reinforces questions about the precise set of parliamentary moves needed to go nuclear.  The CRS report that I mentioned in my previous post goes into nuanced detail on this matter.

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