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John McGinnis op-ed for Investor’s Business Daily

February 13, 2013 by

2-7 AcceleratingJohn McGinnis, author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance through Technology, proposes in his book that the government does not take full advantage of the benefits that technology gives. He explains that recent technology can be used to better analyze past, present, and future public policy. In a recent op-ed for Investor’s Business Daily, he explains how prediction markets can serve as a way to discover if policies will be beneficial before they are fully enacted. McGinnis argues that prediction markets are not the same as internet gambling and that they should be legalized as a way to assess policies that fits the technology of today.

Read the full op-ed below.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: International Relations, Law, Political Science, Twitter

Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters- Winner of Goldsmith Book Prize

February 13, 2013 by

2-13 whyAmericanshateCongratulations to Jonathan M. Ladd whose book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters, was recently selected as the winner of the 2013 Goldsmith Book Prize in the Academic Category!

“The Goldsmith Book Prize is awarded to the trade and academic book published in the United States in the last 24 months that best fulfills the objective of improving democratic governance through an examination of the intersection between the media, politics and public policy.

The Goldsmith Book Prizes honor the best academic and trade books of the year in the field of media, politics and public policy. The Prizes are underwritten by an annual gift from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation. The authors will be honored at the Goldsmith Awards Ceremony at Harvard’s Kennedy School on March 5, 2013.”

For more information about the award, and the full list of finalists and winners, click here.

Filed Under: American History, International Relations, Political Science, Twitter

Padgett & Powell Guest Bloggers for Orgtheory.net: Second Post

February 13, 2013 by

2-7 theemergenceJohn Padgett and Walter Powell, authors of The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, are guest bloggers for February for Orgtheory.net. In their latest blog, Padgett and Powell discuss some of the mechanisms that allow multiple networks to become synced for better productivity for an organization. They also give examples of each mechanism including some successes and failures that have resulted from their application.

John F. Padgett is professor of political science and (by courtesy) professor of sociology and history at the University of Chicago. Walter W. Powell is professor of education and (by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science, communication, and public policy at Stanford University.

Check out part of their second blog below.

the emergence of organizations and markets, part 2: a guest post by john padgett and woody powell

Single autocatalytic networks generate life, but they do not generate novel forms of life. There is nothing outside of a single decontextualized network to bring in to recombine with what is already there. Self-organizing out of randomness into an equilibrium of reproducing transformations, the origin of life, was a nontrivial accomplishment, to be sure. But this is not quite speciation, which is emergence of one form of life out of another.

Transpositions and feedbacks among multiple networks are the sources of organizational novelty. In a multiple-network architecture, networks are the contexts of each other. Studying organizational novelty places a premium on measuring multiple social networks in interaction because that is the raw material for innovation. Subsequent cascades of death and reconstruction may or may not turn initial transpositions (innovations) across networks into system-wide invention.

Read the rest of the post here.

 

 

Filed Under: Economics, International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Twitter

John McGinnis on Technology and the Government

February 9, 2013 by

In such a fast paced world, it only makes sense that everything in our lives moves as quickly as we do. Whether the speed is through our internet connection or news updates, our society feeds off technological advances that have made our lives quicker and more efficient. In the government, however, technology has not been fully embraced thus giving the government a slow image. Recently, Todd Park became the White House chief technology officer and aims to change the government’s image. In Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology by John McGinnis, he explains how fast-evolving information technologies can be used to better analyze past, present, and future public policy but says that this can only happen if the government keeps up with technology’s pace. In a recent interview with The Takeaway, McGinnis discusses his book and why the government should use technology to test social policy and more.

 

Filed Under: International Relations, Law, Political Science, Twitter

John Padgett & Walter Powell: February Guest Bloggers for Orgtheory.net

February 7, 2013 by

John F. Padge2-7 theemergencett and Walter W. Powell, co-authors of The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, will be contributing to the orgtheory.net blog for the month. They will be discussing their book and other thoughts throughout the month. Fabio Rojas, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, says that their blog postings will be “*required* reading for sociologists, management scholars, political scientists, and economists.”

John F. Padgett is professor of political science and (by courtesy) professor of sociology and history at the University of Chicago. Walter W. Powell is professor of education and (by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science, communication, and public policy at Stanford University.

Check out part of their first blog below.

emergence of organizations and markets, part I by padgett & powell

A guest post by John Padgett and Woody Powell about their new book The Emergence of Organizations and Markets:

Innovation in the sense of product design is a popular research topic today, because there is a lot of money in that. Innovation, however, in the deeper sense of new actors—new types of people, new organizational forms—is not even much on the research radar screen of contemporary social scientists, even though “speciation” (to use the biologists’ term for this) lies at the heart of historical change over the longue durée, both in biological evolution and in human history. Social science—meaning mostly economics, political science and sociology—is very good at understanding selection, both at the micro level of individual choice and at the macro level of institutional regulation and lock-in. But novelty, especially of actors but also of alternatives, has first to enter from off the stage of our collective imaginary for our existing theories to be able to go to work. Our analytical shears for trimming are sharp, but the life forces that push up novelty to be trimmed tend to escape our attention, much less our understanding. If this book accomplishes anything, we at least hope to put the research topic of speciation—the emergence of new organizational forms and people—on our collective agenda.

Read the full post here.

Filed Under: Economics, International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, Twitter

Pew Charitable Trusts releases first EPI, Elections Performance Index, based on Prof. Heather Gerken’s book The Democracy Index

February 6, 2013 by

The flaws in the American election system are deep and widespread, extending beyond isolated voting issues in a few locations and flaring up in states rich and poor, according to a major new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The group ranked all 50 states based on more than 15 criteria, including wait times, lost votes and problems with absentee and provisional ballots, and the order often confounds the conventional wisdom.

…

A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor’s Gerken’s 2009 book, “The Democracy Index,” was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said.

“Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings,” Professor Gerken said. “But it also produces professional peer pressure.”

via U.S. Voting Flaws Are Widespread, Study Shows – NYTimes.com.

 

Back in 2009, we published The Democracy Index by Heather Gerken. The book proposed a ranking system for U.S. elections that would look at everything from the average time a voter has to wait in line, to whether the polling place is adequately staffed, to how accurately votes are counted. The idea was to identify states with practices that “work” and motivate states appearing toward the bottom of the list to improve their practices. The ranking system would be publicly available, similar to U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, and empower rank and file voters to identify problems and demand their officials look into election practices.

Thanks to Pew, we now have an interactive site where we can explore just how well different states fared during the 2008 and 2010 elections and we can definitively say that while Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Minnesota have a lot to celebrate, Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia should probably re-evaluate their current voting systems.

This graphic shows the state by state turnout:

Capture

(Source: http://www.pewstates.org/research/data-visualizations/measuring-state-elections-performance-85899446194)

Only 49% of eligible voters in Hawaii cast their ballot compared 78.1% in Minnesota.

 

This graphic shows the average times voters waited in line:

2008 vote

(Source: http://www.pewstates.org/research/data-visualizations/measuring-state-elections-performance-85899446194)

Vermont voters waited an average of 2.5 minutes, while South Carolina voters clocked in an average of 61.5 minutes. Hope they brought a book to read while waiting on line. Speaking of which, for more background on the EPI, read The Democracy Index.
The Democracy Index
Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It
Heather K. Gerken

Reviews

Table of Contents

Sample the Introduction [HTML] or [PDF]
Filed Under: Election 101 - How We Vote, Political Science, Public policy, Twitter

2 PUP Titles Listed on ForeignAffairs.com’s “The Best Books of 2012 on the Middle East”

February 5, 2013 by

2-4 Foreign-Affairs-logoCongratulations to Taner Akçam author of  The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire and Jenny White  author of Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks for each having their respective works listed on ForeignAffairs.com’s “Best International Relations Books of 2012” in the “Best Books of 2012 on the Middle East” category- L. Carl Brown’s and John Waterbury’s picks.

“L. Carl Brown, the professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, was Middle East reviewer for Foreign Affairs for the January/February through May/June issues this year. John Waterbury, the William Stewart Tod professor of Politics and International Affairs emeritus at Princeton became Middle East reviewer with the September/October issue.”

Reviews by ForeignAffairs.com:

2-4 theyoungturk The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity
The book’s title issues a stark indictment; the text methodically and dispassionately sustains it. In February 1914, international pressure forced the Ottomans to acquiesce to eventual self-rule for the Armenians in Anatolia’s eastern provinces. The Ottomans entered World War I in order to annul this agreement, but they feared that it would come back in some other form. According to Akçam, a Turkish historian, their preemptive “solution” was to shrink the Armenian population from around 1.3 million to around 200,000 within a few years, through deportation, starvation, and other means, including the outright murder of probably around 300,000 Armenians. Akçam claims that the Special Organization of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the secular nationalist party of the Young Turks, handled the genocide and was abetted by Mehmet Talat Pasha, the minister of the interior. All instructions were coded, delivered by CUP emissaries, and destroyed after being read. Plausible deniability was built into the system; the CUP knew it had tracks to cover. For a layman, the argument is convincing but not airtight. It is possible to see how the evidence presented could also be spun to fit a scenario of unplanned mass carnage. But the fact that a Turkish historian with access to the Ottoman archives has written this book is of immeasurable significance.

2-4 muslimnationalismMuslim Nationalism and the New Turks
Even for those already familiar with contemporary Turkey, this sometimes disturbing book will be an eye opener. Drawing on four decades of direct observation of Turkish society, White explores the complexities of evolving notions of Turkish identity. She focuses mainly on the Muslim nationalists who have emerged since 1980. They are a rambunctious lot, full of seeming contradictions: for example, according to a 2009 study that White cites, 38 percent of young people who support the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party nevertheless describe themselves as “Kemalists”—that is, admirers of Kemal Atatürk, the stringently secularistic founder of the Turkish republic. White also explores the foibles of contemporary Turkish secularists: their obsession with racial purity, their fear of debasement through interaction with outsiders, and their sacralization of the republic’s borders. The new Muslim nationalists, in contrast, are more open to diversity, support Turkey’s association with the eu, and seek ways to include ethnic Kurds and minority sects in the body politic. They have also embraced neoliberal economic thought to a surprising degree. Alas, all these competing visions of modern Turkey relegate women to a subordinate status.

 

Filed Under: Awards, Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, Twitter

Amy Binder on MSNBC’s “The Cycle”

February 1, 2013 by

Amy Binder, co-author with Kate Wood of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, was on the guest spot of MSNBC’s “The Cycle” to debunk myths about conservative undergraduates:

Filed Under: Education, Political Science, Social Sciences, Sociology, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

Boilerplate reviewed in The Wall Street Journal

January 26, 2013 by

The overload of tiny text in the Terms of Service Agreement is for most people just a blur of words that they don’t take the time to read. Most people I know bypass the reading and head straight for the little square box next to the words “I agree to the terms and conditions” without thinking twice. In Margaret Jane Radin’s book Boilerplate, she examines how these fine print service agreements or boilerplate contracts might seem very little but can have a big impact. Boilerplate contracts threaten rights that people would otherwise be entitled to if they had not agreed to the terms of services agreement. They are not real contracts at all and actually degrade the moral basis of contract law.

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed Boilerplate and called it “[A] sophisticated and thought-provoking treatment of the boilerplate contracts that everyone signs yet few read or understand.”

Read the full review here and read Boilerplate, and maybe even read the terms of service agreement the next time you buy music or rent an apartment.

Filed Under: Law, Political Science, Twitter

The Gamble by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck–third free e-chapter “All In” is now available

January 24, 2013 by

As you may recall, we are serializing chapters from a forthcoming political science book, The Gamble by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. The plan is to release several chapters ahead of the print publication in early fall (in fact, we released two in August — The Hand You’re Dealt [PDF], and Random, or Romney? [PDF]). The third chapter, All In [PDF], is now available for free on our web site and through all major e-book retailers.

**click on any of the PDFs above to download and save the chapters to your computers or devices.

The reason for this unique publishing program is to get a foothold in the first draft of history. Too often, serious political science scholarship — the stuff of huge data sets, charts, graphs, analysis — is published years after the journalists and pundits have already set the tone for how we remember and think about historical moments. In the year following a presidential election, we can expect a slew of books recounting campaign triumphs and missteps, documenting every tour stop and what the candidates wore, said, and did, but what we don’t normally get is rigorous assessment of how the campaigns really worked. Was President Obama’s campaign really as good as everyone thinks? Did the 47% video really make a difference? How about all those political ads — did they sway the election results?

This is what political scientists like Sides and Vavreck can bring to the discussion and why it is so important for us to get their book to readers in a better-than-timely fashion. Drawing on unprecedented data sets tracking voters before and during the presidential campaigns, the authors can provide what was really happening behind the headlines.

Now we’ll cut to John Sides’ description of this chapter:

This new chapter, “All In,” picks up the story on the eve of the Iowa caucus and takes it through Romney’s de facto nomination in April. The chapter is thus the story of Romney’s success. Of course, at this point, the Republican primary seems like ancient history. But I think there is value in realizing why it was that the party coalesced around Romney.”

One of my favorite graphs in this chapter looks at the size of various groups within the GOP —as measured in YouGov polls—and the percentage of those groups that supported Romney or Santorum.

What this graph shows is that contrary to some characterizations of the Republican Party—such as Frank Rich’s “The Molotov Party”—those who identified with the Tea Party, or said they were “very conservative,” or said that abortion should always be illegal, or said they were “born again” were minorities among even Republican likely voters. More moderate groups—such as those who did not identify as born again, or believed abortion should be legal always or sometimes—were much larger.

Moreover, it was among these larger groups that Romney was the favored candidate. Santorum’s appeal was much more niche. That is one reason why Romney became the nominee: this “Massachusetts moderate” appealed to a wider swath of the party than his competition.

 

Intrigued? Read more by downloading this free PDF of “All In”.

Filed Under: Election 101, Election 101 - Campaigns, Election 2012, Political Science, Twitter

Daniel Stedman Jones on Masters of the Universe

January 18, 2013 by

Stedman-Jones-at-LSE-3[3]Princeton author Daniel Stedman Jones had a busy day on 16th January promoting his recently published ‘Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics’. In the afternoon he appeared on BBC Radio 4′s ‘Thinking Allowed’ and that evening he was the lead speaker at a public lecture based around the book at the London School of Economics where his respondents were Professor Lord Skidelsky and Professor Mark Pennington. Please follow the links to catch up with both events.

Filed Under: American History, Comparative History, Economic History, Economics, European History, Events, History, International Studies, Political Science, Political Theory, Twitter

Corey Brettschneider on The Glenn Show, Public Ethics Radio, and more

December 11, 2012 by

Political and constitutional theorist Corey Brettschneider has been busy doing a number of interviews to promote his book, When the State Speaks, What Should it Say: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality. His book looks at the quandary often faced by democracies when they are forced to choose between protecting the right of its citizens to engage in hate-related speech, or violating freedom of expression. Brettschneider argues that the state should protect the right to express discriminatory beliefs, but that it should actively engage in democratic persuasion, publicly criticizing or giving reasons to reject such hate-based views. Check out his first interview on Bloggingheads about his book, and his second, a discussion of race and public / private distinction. Corey  also appeared on Public Ethics Radio  (sponsored by Carnegie Endowment) with Christian Barry  to discuss his book, and took part in a New Books in Philosophy interview with Robert Talisse.

For a detailed look at When the State Speaks, What Should it Say, check out the online symposium on Publicreason.net, an ongoing chapter-by-chapter discussion of his book, with contributions by an array of prominent scholars.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Political Philosophy, Political Science, Political Theory, Twitter
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