Elections Markets and Networks

This is a course blog for POL SCI 387 at UW–Milwaukee. Michael Tofias

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Wrapping Up Spring 2011

Folks, we're at the end of the semester and the end of this blog. Make sure you wrap up your own blogging very soon because we are about to grade your final posts. You also have less than 36 hours to take the Final Exam. BTW I've been told by at least one person that the essay question is "fun." Good luck to those who have yet to take it. While it's still not warm out, it has been really sunny and the [Red Sox are finally above .500](http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/AL/2011.shtml). I'm ready for Summer. I'm sure you are too. So start enjoying the weather, watch lots of baseball games, and stop by in the Fall anytime you are creeping around Bolton Hall. And you might guess, a lot of the concepts we've worked with this semester rear their ugly heads in [Party Politics in America (POL SCI 421)](https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/tofias/www/teach/party/) which is an online course I am teaching for Fall 2011 and [Congressional Politics (POL SCI 426)](https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/tofias/www/teach/congress/) which I am scheduled to teach as a face-to-face course in Spring 2012. You'd certainly have a leg up in those classes against folks who took basket weaving instead of POL SCI 387. Oh, and I've been singing the praises of using tumblr for online courses to professors in other departments and universities. Please let me know by email, blog post, or the End of the Semester Survey on D2L if that is a great or terrible idea. Also email me to let me know if you want me to share your blog as an example of The Awesome. Thanks.

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Or it's called the _World_ Wide Web for a reason.

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Everybody's Talking

Of course everybody is rightly talking about the Osama Bin Laden killing. This has been a United States priority for nearly 10 years and two presidential administrations. I don't have much to say about the implications for domestic politics (not that I think it doesn't matter, just that it is too hard to say how it will matter or how much). But I do think there are two interesting aspects to the story with respect to the course.

First, a story about a man in Pakistan who unknowingly was live blogging the raid on Bin Laden's compound. As social media becomes more pervasive it's going to become harder and harder for people to hide and governments to conceal covert military actions. This is perhaps the ultimate we have met big brother and it is us story. The right to bear arms might soon pale in comparison to the right to bear witness.

Second, tomorrow if not today, security analysts and pundits will turn to wondering if we are safer now than we were before the raid and the killing. Of course the US government's move to put military bases and embassies on high alert last night reveals the answer. For this, I refer you back to the opening anecdote of Christakis and Fowler's Connected. That very human motivation for vengeance is terribly hard to contain and makes us all less safe.

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Luke is back at it with help for your papers. This time he has a round up of pointers to some high quality journalism on social media issues.

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A tremendous argument about information, institutions, and markets from economist Hernando de Soto:

Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government’s role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind’s greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.

That is the conclusion. Go read the whole thing (via MR).

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Funny, but useful (via Marginal Revolution).

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Speaking of Munger, check out his star turn as a security guard in this oddly and yet extremely entertaining economic debate as a rap in Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two

See also Round One, Fear the Boom and Bust: a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem.

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Make it happen.

See also Luke on searching for academic materials.

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My former dissertation co-chair, still sometime co-author, and occasional North Carolina high office seeker Michael Munger has posted some political economy podcasts of guest speakers from the course he was teaching this Spring.

John David Lewis: Podcast (Professor at Duke's PPE Program) "The Role of Commerce in the Ancient World"

Timur Kuran: Podcast (Professor at Duke in Economics and Political Science) "The Long Divergence: Economic Institutions in the Islamic World"

William Dougan: Podcast (Professor in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University) "The Economist and the State: The Chicago View"

Kevin Grier: Podcast (Professor in the Department of Economics at University of Oklahoma) "U.S. Monetary Policy: Past, Present, and Future"

I haven't listened yet, but they match up well with our course material (apples, trees) and some of your research papers.

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By now, I asume you all saw that Standard & Poor’s issued a report that the U.S. government was at risk of losing its AAA credit rating. I'm sure after reading The Big Short you're wondering who still cares about credit ratings. It turns out that the Obama administration cares.

From the Washington Post:

The Obama administration privately urged Standard & Poor's in recent weeks not to lower its outlook on the United States -- a suggestion the ratings agency ignored.

So now you know.

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From the Washington Post:

The company will stream the event live at 4:45 p.m. EST from its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, and Obama will take previously submitted questions through the Facebook and White House sites.

I can't find a link to the video but coverage on CNN consisted of the anchor being disappointed with only 32,000 Facebook users signed up to attend (try holding that crowd in your high school gym) and yet oddly dismissive of schemes used to aggregate questions from thousands of people (the moderated approach to be used today and past mechanisms with voting on questions). Sure, this isn't a town hall, it's theatre, but aren't all town hall style events theatre?

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At the "Connected the Book" website are videos from each of the authors, including James Fowler's appearance on The Colbert Report.

Link via a Mighty Member of POL SCI 387.

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Tanya Joosten, the Associate Director (Interim) at the UWM Learning Technology Center is giving a talk that has a pretty interesting title. Joosten researches and teaches about the role technology in education, virtual worlds, and the role of technology in group decision-making. The talk might be provocative for some of your projects.

Wednesday 5:30-6:30pm, April 27th, at the UWM School of Continuing Education.

More information on the talk here.

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[M]ost of political life happens outside of elections. The capacity to transform governance through the Internet is even greater than the capacity to transform elections. The Internet can change how legislation is prioritized, drafted, passed, implemented, and reviewed, and how elected officials interact with their constituents on a daily basis. The lists of volunteers built during campaigns can be mobilized to engage citizens in research, public education, and collecting stories from offline constituents.

Zephyr Teachout

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Political scientist Xavier Marquez created a Hot or Not style website for aggregating people's beliefs about the quality democratic governance in various countries.

Basically, this is a webpage where you are presented with a comparison between two countries, and asked which one is more democratic (you can answer “I don’t know,” and give a reason). The results of the pairwise comparisons can be used to generate a ranking, which represents something like the probability that a given country would be more democratic than a randomly selected country.

Marquez used the website All Our Ideas which can be used to create surveys and crowdsourcing data collection projects of various kinds. Found via Jonathan Bernstein's A Plain Blog about Politics.

More on crowdsourcing ("collecting contributions from many individuals to achieve a goal") from Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times.

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Mike Allen for Politico on the Obama 2012 campaign and smart phones:

Strategists plan to customize videos and other messages for the iPhones and other mobile devices of targeted groups of voters. They also envision “virtual networks” among supporters’ friends and families, so that millions of people will feel a personal connection to the campaign.

Get Out the Vote 2.0.

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Does anyone remember the story of the One Red Paperclip guy who traded his way from trash to a house in Canada?