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Elections as stimulus
The amount of money in American elections is mind-boggling:
House and Senate candidates have already shattered fundraising records for a midterm election and are on their way to surpassing $2 billion in spending for the first time, according to new campaign finance data. To put it another way: That’s the equivalent of about $4 million for every congressional seat up for grabs this year.
Ezra Klein shows how this can help the economy:
Dan Gross wants to see us holding elections every year, or maybe every two years. But it’s not because of the salutary effect they have on democracy. It’s because of the stimulative effect they have on the economy:
Every four years, when Michael Bloomberg runs for Mayor, the Big Apple is transformed into a winter wonderland where it’s Christmas all year round — at least for the consultants, ad salespeople, canvassers, caterers, and hangers-on whom the mayor employs. In 2009, Bloomberg injected $102 million into the city’s economy in order to win a third four-year term for a job that pays him only $1 per year.
No wonder the city’s leaders decided to overturn the law limiting a mayor to two terms. Having Bloomberg run for re-election is like staging a Super Bowl, NBA All-Star game, and World Series.
Meg Whitman is doing Bloomberg one better. In her bid to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger as California’s governor, the former EBay CEO has already plowed $140 million into the Golden State’s stricken economy. One can only hazard a guess as to how much higher California’s unemployment rate (12.4 percent in September) would be without Whitman.
In Connecticut, where I live, another CEO is having an even greater proportional impact. Former WWE CEO Linda McMahon through mid-October had spent more than $41 million of her own money on a Senate campaign — about $25 for every voting age adult in the state. McMahon is single-handedly boosting Connecticut’s office and retail vacancy rates by renting out storefronts, and has saturated the airwaves with ads the way Starbucks has saturated Seattle.
Self-funders are only part of the equation. With political passions running high in recent years, millions of citizens have made small donations. Sharron Angle, who is challenging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, raised a stunning $14 million in the third quarter, mostly from small donors.
Then there’s corporate money. In the past two years, America’s CEOs have become a bunch of Scrooge McDucks. Unwilling to hire and slow to boost dividends, they hoard cash and loosen purse strings only for overseas expansion (or CEO compensation). But now that it’s easier to make big donations without having to disclose them, corporations are getting involved in politics in a big way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has hit up members to fund tens of millions of dollars in campaign spending. Bush adviser Karl Rove, eager to get back into the game, set up American Crossroads, which has raised tens of millions of dollars from corporations and other donors.
Surely some economist somewhere has done a study investigating whether high-cost elections stimulate local economies, right? It seems like a perfect natural experiment.
Bicameral legislatures and budget deficits
Downsizing Legislatures
Monkey Cage reader Thomas Hurst sends me this Wall Street Journal article on state legislatures that are considering the cost effectiveness of unicameralism. He asks: what effects does bi- vs. unicameralism have?
Here’s a little research (gated, I’m afraid) by William Heller:
In this study I look at the relationship between bicameralism and government budget deficits. The more actors there are who can kill legislation or influence its content, the more deals must be cut to pass a budget. Bicameralism sets up a bilateral veto game between legislative chambers, which leads to higher government budget deficits, all else constant. Since it is easier to cut deals to raise spending than to raise taxes, the need to cut deals across the chambers of a bicameral legislature generally leads to higher spending and, hence, higher deficits. I test this hypothesis on a sample of deficits from 17 countries, from 1965 to 1990.
Here also is a review essay on (gated) by Heller.
In this working paper (pdf), Michael Cutrone and Nolan McCarty review the formal modeling and evidence on bicameralism and conclude:
bq, In this essay, we have considered a number of arguments in favor of bicameralism as an organizing principal for modern legislatures. When viewed through the tools of contemporary legislative analysis – spatial, multilateral bargaining, and informational models – the case for bicameralism seems less than overwhelming. Even in models where bicameralism might have an effect, we find that the necessary conditions for such an effect are empirically rare. Further, much of the empirical evidence of the policy effects bicameralism is either weak or attributable to either malapportionment or supermajoritarianism, outcomes that could theoretically be produced in unicameral legislatures.
If readers know of any other research, please discuss in comments.
True bicameralism (unlike Britain’s) doesn’t work simply because it makes policymaking very difficult. It leads to negotiated, watered down policies which are usually sub-optimal.
Taiwanese cartoonists do the Stewart/ Colbert rally.
What it says on the tin:
BTW, I love Glenn Beck’s reaction: Place a Hitler moustache on him! and the dig at Americans who would rather go get a McDonald’s than vote. So harsh.
Why aren’t rappers (and black people generally) raving right-wingers?
this is very US-centric.
Thomas Chatterton Williams follows up on his WSJ op-ed to explain why hip-hop is inherently conservative:
It’s not just that hip-hop is, to put the matter mildly, pro-gun rights (most mainstream rappers could be on the NRA’s payroll), atavistically homophobic (Byron Hurt documented this convincingly in Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, where even a "conscious" rapper like Talib Kweli is unwilling to go against the anti-gay grain) and spectacularly patriarchal (male-female inequality has always been the law of the hip-hop nation) — it is also unquestioningly God-fearing and, not infrequently, proselytizing. …
Which reminds one of this Onion classic:
The Lord Almighty finally responded to nearly two decades of praise in hip-hop album liner notes Monday, when He gave a shout-out back to all His loyal niggaz. "Right about now, I want to send a shout-out to each and every nigga who’s shown Me love through the years," said the Lord, His booming voice descending from Heaven. "I got mad love for each and every one of you niggaz. Y’all real niggaz out there, you know who you are. Y’all was there for me, and it’s about time I’m-a give some love back to God’s true crew." "All y’all niggaz, y’all be My niggaz," the Lord added.
Williams continues:
I bring all this up simply to point out that hip-hop music and culture, while often nihilistic and self-sabotaging, from a political standpoint is almost never radical or even merely progressive. There is a reason the hip-hop generations have never produced a Huey Newton or a Malcolm X. Hip-hop — when it transcends the gutter and goes beyond the streets — doesn’t want to overthrow the system; on the contrary, it wants desperately and at any cost ("Get Rich or Die Tryin’") to join it.
[My emphases].
The reasons highlighted have always made me wonder why rappers have never warmed to a Republican party which has been all about God, low taxes, guns, and regressive social policies and viewpoints. Which modern rapper doesn’t want his money and guns left alone or acknowledges that homosexuality is acceptable? You can imagine that T-Pain actually wants the Conservative Victory he gives a shout-out for here — if not for the confused look on his face:
What I’ve concluded is that rappers consider themselves as being members of the black community first of all, then individual artists. This identification as black people first, leads them to place higher import on what affects the black community at large.* Greater individualism would lead to a focus on what benefits them most but would harm those back in the (usually poor) ‘hood; lower taxes, and lower social spending- things the GOP wants.
There is also the perception that the GOP is anti-black and more generally, anti-minorities, which has been built up through tough law and order initiatives (such as the three strikes laws) which have significantly affected black people.
And decisions, such as with Hurricane Katrina, which have led to a belief that, paraphrasing Kanye West, the GOP doesn’t care about black people:
* This could be through personal choice or due to the social pressures not to “sell out”.
The Economist’s summary of Arab media reaction to the WikiLeaks’ Iraq-war files
Can be found here.
In Venezuela, you get money off the Capitalist Price.
From my inbox:
Dear Professor,
I´m from Venezuela. And this picture shows the kind of things you find when you go to a Mercado Bicentenario in Venezuela (which is the new name of a chain of private markets -Cada and Exito- recently expropiated and now runned by the Government).
This one is from Mercado Bicentenario, in Centro Comercial Ciudad Tamanaco (CCCT), a mall, in Caracas, Venezuela.
It says:
Description of the product: Diana Oil.
Fair Price: 4,73 Bfs.
Capitalist Price: 7 Bfs.
% of savings: 32%.
My best regards, and congratulations for your blog, books and everything!
Personally, all I want to know is how they determined the “Capitalist Price”. As we know, in the capitalist system, prices are determined by supply and demand and I doubt there is a functioning market system in Venezuela. Except if they are using the prices that prevailed before the government expropriation.
True even for the non-religious.
For the non-religious, replace God with “your better nature”/ “selflessness” or something. It just won’t make a pretty picture.
Picture by Belgian artist Fred Eerdekens. Official website here.
Meh. I bet I could do that if I bothered.
Yeah, right.
Labour could have been creamed (and probably deserved it)
The Guardian’s April Fool’s joke before the general election must have made Labour Party strategists to think twice.
More gems from Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley’s superb The British General Election of 2010. Some of the stuff about Labour’s campaign is quality comedy. The party’s “war book”, they report,
listed so many potential negatives that when it came to analysis of the party’s strengths and weaknesses the authors had to use a smaller font size to detail the weaknesses.
They also reveal that the Guardian’s April Fool stunt, reporting Labour’s latest poster with the slogan, “Step Outside Posh Boy” (right), was close to one of the party’s real poster designs, featuring a picture of Gordon Brown, which had been drawn up but not used: “He’s the toughest boss in Britain.”
In an endnote, the authors add: “‘Made in Scotland from Girders’ was also not used.”
The Essence of Partisan Political Media
The rise of Fox News on the right and MSNBC’s follow-up pincer movement on the left have trapped and isolated CNN inside its brand, desperate to find a way forward. There are still times—presidential elections, global catastrophes—when news as it was traditionally understood can still win the ratings game. And CNN, because of its premium advertising rates, international networks, affiliates, and websites, is still surprisingly profitable: Last year, CNN generated $500 million in profit, its best year ever. But it’s a television commandment that thou must succeed in prime time. Even in prime time, CNN actually gets plenty of viewers, but they tend to click through rather than linger. And Fox’s secret is that viewers stay. That’s because Fox’s rightward flanking maneuver, capturing a disenfranchised part of the audience, was only part of its strategy. The news, especially political news, wasn’t something that happened. It was something that you shaped out of the raw data, brought out of the clay of zhlubby, boring politics, reborn with heroes and villains, triumphs and reverses, never-ending story lines—what TV executives call “flow.” And the beauty of it was that the viewers—the voters—were the protagonists, victims of evil Kenyan socialist overlords, or rebels, coming to take the government back. There was none of the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand relativity crossfire that mirrors the journalism-school ideal of objectivity. All the fire went one way. The viewers, on their couches, were flattered as the most important participants, the foot soldiers in Fox’s army; some of them even voted.
From a terrific article on American political journalism. It looks at how the CNN and MSNBC have sought to counter Fox News’ ratings dominance. MSNBC has done better by becoming Fox News –though its “talent” dispute this– for the political left.
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Clueless 3655 