Throughout this book the authors use the word "securitization" as the name of a process, or "securitize" as a verb. To securitize an issue X is to come to regard X as a security issue or threat. The process of securitization brings a nation-state's decision-making elite to this point: X is a threat. Once in a while, too, a desecuritization takes place. What had formerly been considered a threat ceases to be so, not because it disappears but because it fades into the status of a background fact. Their use of these two words can be a little confusing for someone accustomed to the very different use of "securitization" in financial news: an asset or income stream is "securitized" by being used as the basis for the sale of securities. But over time I did become accustomed to their use. Simply by using the word in this way, they have suggested that what is or is not a security issue is not a given -- that it is, to a great extent, a matter of...
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The remainder of this week's posts will consist of reactions to last week's election. Rather low-key reactions, given the stakes: but you'll judge that for yourself. First thought: Back to the drawing board for Lichtman? The political scientist Allan Lichtman has identified 13 "keys to the White House" through which, he has said, the outcome of any particular presidential election can be predicted with a degree of certainty that dominates the pre-vote poll results. The underlying idea is that the election is always a referendum on the incumbent administration, whether it is an effort at re-election or not. The distinction between an incumbent seeking re-election and an incumbent party seeking to manage a passing of the baton is accounted for in one of the keys. Each key is a binary statement to which one can respond "true" or "false," and the "true" response favors the incumbent party. If more than five of the keys draw a ...
According to one prominent political-science theory, a candidate of the party that is incumbent in the White House is nearly certain to win an election if he possesses at least six of 13 possible "keys". He does not need all, or most, or even a majority. He needs six. Each key is a binary question, allowing only yes or no answer, though sometimes the answer will require an exercise of judgment, not mere arithmetic or observation. For clarity -- for many of these keys the ABSENCE of something is taken as a positive. So a "yes" answer has the form, "yes, it is true that X did not happen." With that understood, let us start through the list and its 2024 application. We are looking at each election from the point of view of the political party incumbent in the White House during the election. 1. Mandate from the House of Representatives. After the last election (the mid-term election prior to the Presidential election under study) did the incumbent Presi...
Some thoughts from a veteran of political-science classes of the late 1970s. We learned of the difference between two foreign-policy realisms: classical and structural. Classical versus structural. Classical realists took the policy maker himself to be the chief object of interest/study. Machiavelli was the font of this approach. James Burnham was a self-conscious adherent. A classical realist won't talk, without qualifications, of a state (a city, in the font's context) as having goals, but will think of the people and factions who hold or are contending for power - a city's Prince or those who would be Prince -- have goals, and their goals become those of ‘the state’ when they achieve positions of command. Those decisions may involve deliberate absorption of the state by a neighbor, or even indifference as to whether the state survives or not. Structural realism speaks of states as having goals, determined by their history and systemic features of their decisi...
There has been a good deal of talk about the "re-opening of the US economy." I have to say: I despise that expression and anything like it. The term "the economy" is a high-level and for many purposes a quite confusing expression. What is the economy, that it could be closed and re-opened, turned off and then back on by some act of political will, so flicking of a finger? "The economy" is a high-level and confusing expression. Consider this answer: the economy is what an economist studies. As opposed to what? the society, which is what a sociologist studies? the body politic, which is what a political scientist studies? Surely they are all studying the same sort of facts, but with somewhat different emphases and methods. Anyway, we have seen of late a lot of orders from a lot of different authorities dictating a lot of particular actions, prohibiting some others. We have seen no flick of a particular switch. We have seen no closing of a given...
It almost seems quaint, nowadays, the focus of some of us a few years back, at the start of this millennium, on the supposed monopolization of the search engine by Google. Three political scientists coined the term "Googlearchy" in 2003, in this passage: Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […] It seems quaint because we've all made our peace with search engines, as part of our normal working life. The action, the controversy, has moved on to social m...
I haven't said much in this blog about the whole Putin-as-puppeteer theory of the 2016 presidential election, and Mueller's investigation. But the days are running short until the Mueller report will drop from the presses, and with Pelosi wielding the gavel, we're getting onto some fascinating terrain. Fascinating for the intellectual consumption of an old poli-sci major from the distinguished Marist College program. The Hill recently listed "five things to know" about the Trump Tower Moscow project. For now I'll simply summarize that publication's discussion. 1) The timeline. Back when Michael Cohen was POTUS' personal lawyer, he testified that Trump's circle conducted discussions about such a project in late 2015, and that the idea had dissipated by the end of January 2016. That would suggest a real but somewhat limited overlap between those talks and the presidential campaigning. More recently, as part of his new status as a cooperatin...
Newly received book: HOW POLICY SHAPES POLITICS: RIGHTS, COURTS, LITIGATION, AND THE STRUGGLE OVER INJURY COMPENSATION. Authors: Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke. Barnes is an associate professor of political science at USC, with a focus on the politics of health policy. Burke is a professor of political science at Wellesley. The title of this book is embarrassingly generic. Of course policy shapes politics. A former poli sci professor of mine used to characterize policy as the "output" of the political system, but with the understanding that of course there is a "feedback loop," with the results of the output continuing to the next day's political debates. That was at Marist College, not USC or Wellesley, but I doubt the title here means much more than is implied in that observation. The subtitle, though, states in a more sensible manner what this book is about.