"In his book Direct Democracy Worldwide, David Altman moves beyond the classic narratives of Greek city-states and New England town halls to demonstrate that this form of government is pertinent today despite its still relatively modest use at the national level. However, although some forms of direct democracy, particularly citizen initiatives, may enhance a larger representational context, others offer little opportunity for authentic popular voice. Direct democracy here is a tool, rather than a system, a tool that has the potential to be harnessed to refine the limitations of representation. Thus, Altman provides a rich evaluation of the possibilities for such input—a much needed addition to this literature—while initiating a longer term agenda for scholars of democracy.
"More historic understandings of direct democracy have offered a simplistic understanding of its use: Citizens gather in a common place, or through a ballot, and themselves determine the policy that will govern their polity. Yet Altman provokes the reader to consider a much more complex constellation of possibilities in his first chapter. Rather than consider direct democracy as a Weberian ideal type of political order, he effectively offers a vision of this process as a function within a larger representational system."

(etc., etc.)

"The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more."

Have I really not bookmarked this before?

"Regime transitions are contagious according to the diffusion-of-democracy literature: a country's regime is affected by others' through various predefined networks (e.g. geographical proximity), as well as by the country's own political, economic and social attributes (e.g. GDP levels). My account departs from the existing diffusion theory by allowing for countries' self-selection into peer regime networks based on their democracy levels in the past. For example, a country can form stronger dependency ties with countries that demonstrated similar democracy levels in the past (homophily). In the longitudinal setting, the traditional diffusion mechanism with the presence of self-selection generates the "co-evolutionary dynamic" between country networks and democracy levels. With this recursive feedback process between tie formation and democracy levels, it becomes extremely difficult to evaluate empirically how each country's level of democracy is determined, because we need to distinguish the following three processes statistically. First, country-specific attributes determine the level of democracy as in the earliest democratization studies. Second, other states' democracy levels also predict a country's regime as demonstrated in the conventional diffusion studies. Finally with my theory of endogenous network formation, the seeming diffusion effect is partially a consequence of their self-selection into peer networks. A newer spatial econometric model, an "M-STAR + Co-Evolution" model, is one of the first that allows us to test for all of these three dynamics behind democratization. In my first-cut analysis, I find that all three processes indeed exist."

ETA: It's good to recognize the problem exists, but the model used here does not make it go away, and still fails to identify the influence effect (if one exists).

"Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms."

"Civil wars cluster in space as well as time. In this study, we develop and evaluate empirically alternative explanations for this observed clustering. We consider whether the spatial pattern of intrastate conflict simply stems from a similar distribution of relevant country attributes or whether conflicts indeed constitute a threat to other proximate states. Our results strongly suggest that there is a genuine neighborhood effect of armed conflict, over and beyond what individual country characteristics can account for. We then examine whether the risk of contagion depends on the degree of exposure to proximate conflicts. Contrary to common expectations, this appears not to be the case. Rather, we find that conflict is more likely when there are ethnic ties to groups in a neighboring conflict and that contagion is primarily a feature of separatist conflicts. This suggests that transnational ethnic linkages constitute a central mechanism of conflict contagion."

As Henry says, se non e vero, e bene trovato.

Oooh, shiny.

"Replication files":
http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/data/shocks-conflict/Bazzi-Blattman.zip?9d7bd4

I want to see the trees!!!

I smell an ADA take-home exam.

"Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.

Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes."

"Though it defies consensus, between 1900 and 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts. Attracting impressive support from citizens that helps separate regimes from their main sources of power, these campaigns have produced remarkable results, even in the contexts of Iran, the Palestinian Territories, the Philippines, and Burma.

Combining statistical analysis with case studies of these specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed-and, at times, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement, information and education, and participator commitment. Higher levels of participation then contribute to enhanced resilience, a greater probability of tactical innovation, increased opportunity for civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for the regime to maintain the status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents’ erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. They find successful nonviolent resistance movements usher in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, this book originally and systematically compares violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, Chenoweth and Stephan find violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds."

"In examining the discussion of social and political phenomena like regime transition, conflict, and policy change, scholars routinely make choices about how proximity is defined and which neighbors should be considered more important than others. Since each specification offers an alternative view of the networks through which discussion can take place, one's decision can exert a significant influence on the magnitude and scope of estimated discussion effects. This problem is widely recognized, but is rarely the subject of direct analysis. In international relations research, connectivity choices are usually ad hoc, driven more by data availability than by theoretically informed decision criteria. We take a closer look at the assumptions behind these choices, and propose a more systematic method to asses the structural similarity of two or more alternative networks, and select one that most plausibly relates theory to empirics. We apply this method to the spread of democratic regime change, and offer an illustrative example of how neighbor choices might impact predictions and inferences in the case of the 2011 Arab Spring."

"A family of models was given to explain how the public budgeting process, as a multi-stage institutional decision making mechanism transforms the stimuli characterized by Gaussian distribution to skew, power law distributions. While the annual change is generally incremental, deviations from this incremental changes are more frequent, than the Gaussian distribution suggests. A set of threshold models, reflecting error-accumulation and friction, was suggested. The three-threshold model seems to be good to describe appropriately the basic statistical features of the data."

"Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the preconditions necessary to do so successfully.

In a major step beyond conventional rational-choice accounts of policy decision-making, this book demonstrates that bounded--not full--rationality drives the spread of innovations across countries. When seeking solutions to domestic problems, decision-makers often consider foreign models, sometimes promoted by development institutions like the World Bank. But, as Kurt Weyland argues, policymakers apply inferential shortcuts at the risk of distortions and biases. Through an in-depth analysis of pension and health reform in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, Weyland demonstrates that decision-makers are captivated by neat, bold, cognitively available models. And rather than thoroughly assessing the costs and benefits of external models, they draw excessively firm conclusions from limited data and overextrapolate from spurts of success or failure. Indications of initial success can thus trigger an upsurge of policy diffusion."

Similar dynamics apply to religions, too, of course.

For next week at Stanford

No comment.

The definition of "democracy" in the abstract strikes me as rather odd.

Master's anthro thesis, applying Hirschman's _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_ to Pashtuns in northern Afghanistan post 2001.

Need to re-examine the polarization bit. I suspect it's not actually incompatible with a sensible story about how polarization has actually grown.

I am not surprised that Nominate is unstable under subsampling, but I had no idea it was _that_ unstable.

Good to see some push-back on this. (I was once able to reduce a statistical geneticist to hysterics by reading aloud from a table of heritabilities from the paper being critiqued here. I am not sure if they have quite forgiven me yet.)

In a logistic regression to predict voting, being a Virgo has a positive and significant coefficient...

When does culture help you realize that not only is it not raining, but that in fact somebody's pissing on you and a lot of other people?

Emerson is in fine form in the comments.

"skin color within a conventionally defined racial group" is not correlated with political attitudes (but is correlated with other things); at least not among blacks & Latinos in the US. Weird.

empirically, "groups from which exit is more costly (professional associations and unions) are structured more democratically than those in which members face fewer barriers to exit (citizen associations)"

Special issue of _Public Choice_ on blogging and politics

Word.