Year: 2004

Quick update on the Midwest paper. The results look good, and the write-up is underway. Essentially, the work progresses in three parts.

First: Spending and political regime type (the fancy way we political scientists refer to the difference between democracies and authoritarian regimes): Theory says that democracies should spend more on social programs on average because the median voter in a democracy demands more social spending than the (hypothetical) median voter in an authoritarian regime. This is one instance where a political scientist has come up with a cool formal model to demonstrate this relationship. See the new book by Carles Boix (just how do you pronounce that, anyway?). My results suggest that democracies do spend more on average on social programs.

At the same time, however, broad literatures suggest that authoritarian regimes are able to implement adjustment policies, structural reforms, etc. more easily than democratic regimes. Variants of this argument usually make general references to the fact that democratic governments have to respond to voters and special interests, while authoritarian governments can just repress dissident voices. Another way to think about this is in terms of veto players. While authoritarian governments are not always unitary actors (i.e., there might be junta or divisions between the army and navy), the number of veto players and their ideological distance from one another are usually going to be fewer and smaller than the veto players and ideological distances in democracies. All this is inspired, in part, by that book by G. Tsebelis that I was telling you about the other day.

So….presumably if adjustments need to be made to the amount of money that is being spent on education, health care or social security in order to enhance the competitiveness of a country’s economy, an authoritarian regime would be able to take more definite or deliberate action to make those adjustments. That is, authoritarian regimes (b/c they have fewer veto players and the ideological distances among those that make up government are likely to be small) should “respond” to globalization pressures more dramatically than democracies. My results support this interpretation, too.

Though democracies, on average, spend more than authoritarian regimes on social programs…as globalization increases (especially trade integration), authoritarian regimes begin to outspend democratic regimes. I have a really nice graph to depict this. Maybe some day I’ll figure out a way to post it here.

But that’s just part 1. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.

In the mean time, I have to go to class and collect papers. My kiddos are proposing institutional reforms that will turn around Latin America’s economic development. I’ll let you know what they think.

Georgia Tech has been in the news again–this time on NPR. The International Affairs student that has been stirring up controversy on campus (see yesterday’s post) was interviewed for Morning Edition, along with Stanley Fish.

Listen.

Not only is academic freedom at risk in Georgia, but a Georgia Representative in the House introduced a bill last fall to protect our youth nationwide from insidious indoctrination by liberal college professors.

I love this state.

Here we go again. This recent article in the local Atlanta Journal Constitution, owned by Cox Communications (which owns 17 newspapers and 25 non-dailies, among cable and other media outlets), was written by two Georgia Tech students in response to the article run last week in the AJC regarding academic prejudice at Tech.

Here are the highlights of the article by Doug Gladden and John Putrich:

…..To recap the story, a Tech professor is accused of saying to a student: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. George Bush isn’t doing anything for you. He’s too busy pimping for the Christian Coalition.”

As students in that class, we feel obligated to speak out on behalf of a professor whom we believe to be fair and highly capable. It doesn’t matter whether or not we agree with what she said. What matters is that alleging “indoctrination” or “discrimination” based on the remark she made is nothing more than a political witch hunt.

The professor was reviewing for an upcoming test when two students decided to engage her in a debate that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. Keep in mind that these same students have previously started discussions on current events rather than the course material. They routinely tried to steer these discussions to get an opinionated reaction from the professor.

After they made their point, the professor replied with her own view, and then encouraged the class not simply to be flag-wavers for any party, but to learn about and support issues rather than a party platform. The professor’s remark was much more a way to end the debate and return to the material in the course rather than an attempt at indoctrination….

…The reality is that students on this campus are starting a “Students for Academic Freedom” organization and are desperate for a test case. The student filing the grievance had stated, upon failing her first test in the class, that she thought it was due to her political views. We would suggest that the grade had nothing to do with political opinion and everything to do with the student not knowing the material on the test.

You can read the full article.

For those that aren’t familiar, Students for Academic Freedom is an organization that is interested in making sure liberal professors don’t indoctrinate our youth.

I’m not sure if the organization was really founded by students or just David Horowitz, who also wrote the Student’s Bill of Rights. I’m not sure that’s the Bill of Rights that my students would have written. At Tech, they’d like their profs to show up prepared, show some interest in them, and teach. They are smart enough to not be indoctrinated.

But I digress…. The Students for Academic Freedom website has other useful information like “How to Research Faculty Bias.” I thought this might suggest that students look up our scholarly research and try to find hidden agendas.

But no, the SFAF wants students to investigate our private political preferences. The site encourages students to look up the political affiliations of professors through voter registration records (with helpful advice, like, “start with literature and comparative politics” and “try to include one science or technology department” with a handy list of the science departments to include). The research design is not exactly bias free, since they are encouraging students to “oversample” fields that are likely to have more lefty profs and under sample the righty sciences.

Not only do they encourage their students to do all this important (biased) research, but to share their results:

Once returned from the registrar’s office, enter the party affiliation in the Excel file, and email the results in an attachment to: info@sfaf.org. Your contribution and hard work are greatly appreciated, and will be acknowledged.

Great. Encourage students to “investigate” and intimidate their professors.

However, if the folks at sfaf.org were really on top of things, they would know that:

1. Most of that info is available online.

2. That Fundrace.org is a great tool for that type of research.

Luckily, here at Tech, the climate is pretty conservative, since we’ve got all those engineering types on campus. In fact, one of my students told my class that he saw a Math professor tear down posters that he was hanging for a peace rally in the spring of 2003 (i.e., height of the Iraq conflict). No, that’s not intimidating….(and yes, he had permission to hang the flyers up on campus).

Just food for thought.

I gotta get back to my Midwest paper.

So, the Jackets let the NCAA championship slip through their fingers. I’d like to be able to say that it was an exciting game, but that only applies to the last 3 minutes unfortunately.

On other fronts, I am still working on my paper for the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. Essentially, I’m trying to explain how domestic political institutions constrain the abilities of middle-income states to respond to globalization pressures and adjust their commitments to social spending (health, education, and social security). Essentially, I could also answer a lot of other questions with the same data, but that would be a book rather than a paper. So, I’m having trouble keeping the paper focused because I know that readers will respond by suggesting a lot of other “factors” that I should control for. Then, there is no agreement on how to model this type of data, so the methodologists will have lots of suggestions on that account. Troubling.

Overall, though, it appears that domestic institutions matter. Authoritarian regimes are much more likely than democracies to increase their investment in health and education in order to keep up and maintain their competitiveness in the world market. Democracies must get bogged down in debates about the appropriate “level” of health and education spending, and in the end, fail to invest enough in human capital. This is interesting because usually we (political scientists) think that the median voter in a democracy will demand higher human capital investment than the median voter in an authoritarian regime (i.e., the bourgeoisie that back the dictatorship).

My efforts to determine how different political institutions in democracies affect social spending commitments are more complicated. In essence, one body of political science literature on political institutions suggests that as the number of veto players (or decision-makers) increases, the likelihood of change decreases. This intuitive and simple argument explains why divided governments in the U.S. are unable to pass budgets or enact significant legislation: the parties just don’t agree and there is a division of power between the executive and legislative branches. Of course, some political scientists have formalized this simple idea so as to make it nearly incomprehensible. See, for instance, the recent (in academic time) book by George Tsebelis. My goodness, that book takes a nice simple argument, and makes it overly complicated.

But anyway….Back to my story. So this body of literature suggests that as the number of actors involved in decision-making increases, policy change becomes less likely. The number of actors, in itself, does not predict the direction of change, just the amount of change. To test this straightforward proposition becomes more complicated, because usually we’re interested not only in the size of change but also whether the change is resulting in more or less spending. So, to really “test” the hypothesis of the veto player literature, I need to look at the effect of political institutions on the amount of change, regardless of the direction of change. When I model the effect of institutions on the size of change, the effect is consistently negative; more veto players lead to less change. This effect, however, is difficult to demonstrate in a picture, so I’m not sure if I’ll convince the skeptics out there.

And, of course, to make matters worse. There are two guys out there that have both published studies on OECD countries that say that there are different types of political institutions. That more parties can lead to more social spending, but divided power (say, between a legislative and executive branch or due to federalism) reduces social spending. These are the results in Duane Swank’s recent book and in a super-recent (even by academic standards) article by Crepaz and Moser in Comparative Political Studies. Note, however, that we are now talking about the effects of institutions on more or less spending, rather than just the amount of change in spending. Of course, when I run similar models to theirs using my data for middle-income countries, I don’t get the same results. Something fishy is going on….

Well, well, well. Georgia Tech is in the Final Four, who would have thunk it? Of course, the success of our men’s basketball team also means that my students want extensions on assignments, excused absences to go to San Antonio, and are just generally getting rowdy.

I’m behind on finishing my Midwest PSA paper, as usual. I have the data and results, it’s just a matter of writing it all up. Which, in part, explains why I’m behind on my weblog….I haven’t even had time to read anything interesting.

Hmmmm….

Happy Birthday Aretha Franklin!

My goodness, the state of Georgia is strange. The latest fruckus is over academic freedom. According to a story in the AJC, the Georgia state legislature considered a resolution to warn university faculties not to discriminate against students based on their political persuasions. What next?

My favorite Idol, Fantasia Barrino.

Alright. So this is the first post of the blog. I’d like to think it will be profound and interesting, but it probably won’t. I’m behind in my grading, as usual, and just found out that I’ve received a Fulbright Award to go to Mexico next year. I just want to glow a bit. According to the letter from the Fulbright organization, I am now in the company of a group that includes 34 Nobel laureates. I guess I better get with it, then.

My students are having a heated debate on WebCT about Richard Clarke’s interview on 60 Minutes . They seem to be asking the right questions: Is it a coincidence that Clarke’s book is being published just as the Presidential campaign season heats up? Why has the media not made a bigger deal out of his allegations? Why does the media seem to be timid when it comes to the White House?

A partial answer to the last question can be found in an interview Alexandra Pelosi gave on NPR when her documentary first aired on HBO.

At least it should be interesting to watch the debate unfold, especially as testimony begins for the 9-11 commission.