IR and Political Science links threads

[Doktor Howl]

But if someone just started dumping cash into Occupy right now would it have the same impact?

I say no because while there certainly was a machine behind it, the Tea Party also had a big singular issue and a The Big Smiler behind the big singular issue to drive the fucker.  Occupy doesn't have that.  They don't have a singular enemy.  They have, what, big greedy fat cats?  Big, greedy fat cats have been around forever, that shit has never got people off the couch.

But buy golly a Black President wants to come and give you some Socialist HealthCare.  Fuck, pack up the guns and go tell those Senators what's what.  And it fucking worked.  We got watered down health care because of it.  Watered-down health care that is probably about to be yanked by SCOTUS.  They fucking won.  The won using bad information, scare tactics, and a bunch of other bullshit, but they won. 

Not even in Occupy's wet dreams does that happen.

Reason being wasn't the target, it was how they did things.  Goofy ass "general assemblies" that turned into fucking circuses, and drove off half the protestors, occupying 24/7 (ensuring that it turned into just a hooverville), etc.

[navkat]

I think the OWS movement had a pretty clear list of requests. The difference here is that while neocons are already happy to oblige in digging in their heels and creating stubborn resistance to anything the liberals attempt to do while simultanously obfuscating the issue enough to do nothing, Democrats are simply NOT willing to forsake their corporate cronies to appease THEIR constituents.

Moral of the story: your team will get everything it wants as long as its agenda is to take shit away from YOU and give it to the CORPORATION.

The OWSers weren't ineffective, they were ignored. In so many ways, that's far worse than the neocons re-directing and exploiting an already willing collective.

[AFK]

Uh, protests that are ignored are pretty ineffective.  I mean, isn't that kind of the point of protests, to NOT be ignored? 

[East Coast Hustle]

Yeah, a big part of the reason OWS was ignored was OWS's own tactics. But I think one of the points to be made here is that the Tea Party would have suffered a similar fate if they had been a pre-existing willing collective. That's an inaccurate characterization of the Tea Party, though. The whole thing was a pre-planned invention funded and backed from the very start by some VERY powerful interests.

[Doktor Howl]

The OWSers weren't ineffective, they were ignored.

That's the same as being ineffective.

[Doktor Howl]

Yeah, a big part of the reason OWS was ignored was OWS's own tactics. But I think one of the points to be made here is that the Tea Party would have suffered a similar fate if they had been a pre-existing willing collective. That's an inaccurate characterization of the Tea Party, though. The whole thing was a pre-planned invention funded and backed from the very start by some VERY powerful interests.

DING.

[Cain]

Bernard Finel has a more IR-theory than normal piece up about why offshore-balancing makes him uncomfortable:

http://www.bernardfinel.com/?p=2020&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-dark-reality-of-off-shore-balancing

The problem is that the offshore balancers tend to focus on the "offshore" part. That is the popular part, of course. It looks cheaper. It promises to avoid future Iraqs and Afghanistans. It suggests an tough-minded approach to the problem of free-riding. But what it does not do is acknowledge the implication of a strategy posited on the importance of "balancing."

In an off-shore balancing world, a nation secures its interests not by contributing to the provision of public goods, but rather by ensuring that no rival becomes dominant in its sphere. It is a designed to prevent the emergences of threats, by ensuring that those threats are locally-focused and locally balanced.

Think about China. How does an off-shore balancer plan to deal with China. Well, an off-shore balancer sees rising Chinese power as a potential threat, but believes that this threat will most immediately be felt by its neighbors. As long as the United States does not take the primary role in containing China, it is assumed that this role will be taken up by its threatened neighbors, either individually or collectively. So, the off-shore balancers believe that if we limit our role in Asia, for example, some combination of India, Japan, Korea, and ASEAN will emerge to check Chinese power. Our role then becomes to ensure that neither side becomes dominant, and to intercede if major imbalances to occur.

Now, most critics of off-shore balance focus on the issue of whether local actors will respond as assumed. They fear this will not occur, and that rather without the United States in the forefront, those local actors will allow themselves to be, essentially, Finlandized. Or, if not that, that at the very least coordination problems will hamper balancing. I disagree with this criticism. I accept the off-shore balancers' assumptions about state behavior. States will seek to balance rivals in the absense of an outside security guarantor.

The question we really need to pose is whether that is the kind of world we want to live in? Do we want to live in a world that is riven by a large number conflicts as states maneuver to balance each other internally (i.e. arms racing) and externally (i.e. alliances)? The problem with the off-shore balancer position is that it is a strategy for exploiting global disorder rather than promoting global order.

I'm generally in favour of offshore balancing as an overall strategic pose, but Finel brings up some very good criticisms here, especially about how the balancing aspect is so firmly situated in Realist "thinking" (and I use that term very loosely) on anarchy that it could have unintended consequences, given that Realists have been utterly wrong about the direction of the post-Cold War world.  The thing is, this argument may be rendered moot in the long term anyway, as financial constraints mean that offshore balancing is the only option left open to the USA, and American allies start re-arming and rebuilding their own military forces as American military spending decreases.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-10/milton-friedman-proved-wrong-by-aluminum-market.html

The question is whether expanded financial interest in aluminum has driven up the level and volatility of prices. The dominant academic perspective suggests that market prices will be determined by physical supply and demand, and that financial trading can, if anything, only drive them more rapidly toward balance.

The first prong of this argument applies to speculation in general. As Milton Friedman wrote in 1953 regarding the exchange-rate market, "People who argue that speculation is generally destabilizing seldom realize that this is largely equivalent to saying that speculators lose money, since speculation can be destabilizing in general only if speculators on the average sell when the currency is low in price and buy when it is high." In other words, trading should drive market prices toward equilibrium because successful traders -- the only ones who will survive -- must "buck the trend" by buying cheap while selling dear.

In the aluminum market, however, a number of the conditions necessary for the Friedman principle to hold appear to be absent.

J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues have shown, for example, that if other market participants tend to follow "positive feedback" strategies by buying when prices rise and selling when prices fall, financial speculators may destabilize prices even as they turn a good profit.

Daniel P. Ahn, a colleague of mine at Citigroup Inc., says that may be precisely what happens when index funds buy aluminum. Even though the funds typically have no information that is unknown to traders, the anonymity of their trades causes the market to misinterpret an index purchase as coming from someone with superior information. Furthermore, index positions are large and most often long. The result is that the initial investment, which causes the price to rise, generates further increases as other traders jump on the bandwagon.

Of course, I am sure you are all aware that for a while I have suspected the role of speculation in driving up food prices around the globe.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/11/romneys-empathy-gap/

In reality, Republicans win all the time without closing the empathy gap. This is because Democratic candidates are generally perceived as more empathetic — more likely to "care about people like me" — than Republican candidates, regardless of who wins. Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 were all perceived as less empathetic than their Democratic opponents. Danny Hayes, a political scientist, has shown that political parties come to "own" certain traits just like they "own" certain issues, and empathy is a "Democratic" trait. (By contrast, Republicans own "leadership," at least in recent presidential races.) To be sure, Mr. Hayes shows that candidates benefit when voters come to view them favorably on trait dimensions that their party does not own. This might give Mr. Romney an incentive to feel some voters' pain. Indeed, in February, Rick Santorum was, counter to stereotype, perceived as no less empathetic than Mr. Obama, so perhaps Mr. Romney could shift perceptions in his favor. But history shows that perceived empathy is no requirement for victory.

In short, it doesn't matter that Romney doesn't care about all those poor people, despite the constant whittering of Democratic blogs (where this point is almost as common as spelling Romney as Rmoney) aside.

http://newpacificinstitute.org/jsw/?p=10071

Published in 1983, Strategic Atlas was one of several atlases published during the 1980s that blended world maps with political, economic and military figures and trends. It was the kind of well done set of infographics that really isn't done anymore, particularly now that nobody wants to pay for content. I'll be featuring maps from it now and then, as they relate to Japan and the rest of Asia, both here and at Asian Security Watch.

I picked up a used copy last year, having gotten rid of my original more than a decade ago. Published during the Cold War, the book is rather dated in several areas, particularly the strategic importance of Asia relative to Europe. To be fair, twenty five years ago Europe was where it was at; even I concentrated in German history in college. I can't imagine doing that now.

Here's one map from back when Japan was considered an economic superpower, on the cusp of becoming a military and political superpower. We all know how that turned out. But this map in particular is interesting.

Several observations follow, most notably that Japan is safe from having its trade routes disrupted, so long as it maintains its alliance with the USA and that, unlike Europe, it is not clear that Japan has benefitted from the end of the Cold War.

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2012/04/13/behind-china%E2%80%99s-big-slowdown/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+the-diplomat+%28The+Diplomat+RSS%29

Over the past 6 months, housing prices have been falling, construction projects slowing, and the real estate market has been tapering off, primarily due to central government policies aimed at cooling the radioactive housing market. But it's not just the real estate sector that's seeing the effects of these policies – there are many other sectors and industries affected.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, residential real estate accounts for nearly 25 percent of such industries as "construction materials and appliances." Indeed, raw materials are highly vulnerable to construction downturns. Some analysts have gone so far as to call this slowdown the beginning of the end for the commodities boom.

The author notes, correctly, that an end to the boom of house-building would have severe social and economic impacts on China.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/constructivism-that-wasnt.html

For this year's ISA conference I was supposed to write a paper called "The Constructivism That Wasn't: On the Non-Inevitability of Sociological Liberalism." The idea was that I would go back and carefully reconstruct those moments of historical contingency in which an alternative IR constructivism -- one which did not so neatly track with sociological liberalism, roughly defined as the notion that individuals' thoughts and beliefs shape their behavior an thus the social world that they inhabit -- might have emerged. The alternative history is simple: accentuate Morgenthau's debt to Nietzsche and Weber and play up his sense of the tragic, reclaim Waltz as an analytical systems theorist instead of the prophet of the inevitable consequences of systemic anarchy for state behavior, push Jervis' work on the manipulation of images and symbols into a more semiotic direction by rooting things in social/discursive instead of cognitive psychology, and then place Nick Onuf's 1989 book (about to be released in a new edition, so people can actually read and assign it!) at the center of an alternate way of worlding, and knowledge-producing, in the field as a whole. Presto, a constructivism that would be just as anti-utopian as the field's founders would have liked: rules, Onuf reminds us, produce rule, and domination (whether legitimate in the Weberian sense, or just naked force) is an omnipresent factor in political life. And then you can fill in the blanks for yourself: insert a whole variety of social and political theorists at appropriate points in the lineage, produce a mashed-up remix of The Culture of National Security and Cultures of Insecurity, and so on.

But as we all know, this didn't happen, and constructivism came to mean "ideational variables matter," where matter = systematic cross-case co-variation, best captured in statistical studies whether large-n "quantitative" or small-n "qualitative" -- and that's not a methodological distinction, that's a lifestyle choice. All of this to the point where I usually don't feel comfortable self-identifying as a "constructivist" without a great deal of qualification. So the more I have thought about it, the more I have become less and convinced that this really could have happened differently in mainstream Anglophone IR, because mainstream Anglophone IR is dominated by US IR, which is constituted as a subfield of US Political Science -- and both US Political Science and US IR bear the traces of the way in which they were legitimated and justified within the US social and political context. In global IR, there may be space for a plurality of voices and visions, and a robust debate about important theoretical and methodological issues like the nature of scientific explanation, the fundamental structure of the world system, and the legacies of imperialism and colonialism (particularly the issue of whether what we have nowadays is any significantly different than what we had during the period of formal colonial empires). But in US IR, as a subfield of US Political Science, the organization of intellectual life forces virtually every interesting question into the liberal cookie-cutter with its twin blades of neopositivism and actor-centric reductionism, and thus neuters anything like a radical critique or even the envisioning of a significantly different alternative future by assuming virtually all of the interesting things away at the outset. If there is actual contingency here, it is the contingency of IR as a separate field of study having been nurtured in the United States.

This is a bit theoretical even for me, but some high-level stuff might be just what the doctor ordered.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/popular-culture-and-civil-military.html

Some of those who missed the ISA panel on popular culture have asked me if I can send them my remarks. So I decided to upload them in video format as well. You can see my presentation on Battlestar Galactica and civil-military relations below. This is essentially a presentation of a research paper I did with two students, which will be published later this year in Nicholas Kiersey and Iver Neumann's Battlestar Galactica and International Relations.

Something a little bit more pop culture, for you.

[Cain]

No comment

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/about/themes/mancept/workingpapers/documents/AdrianBlauAnti-StraussforthcomingTheJournalofPolitics2012.pdf

Why does Hobbes write no book on music? It would be scandalous to say that this was an oversight. But what shall we make of Hobbes's silence about music? An author may reveal his intentions by the title of his books. Two of Hobbes‟s books, and only two, have titles consisting of one word only: Leviathan and Behemoth. The number of books in the Leviathan is five, if we include the "Review and Conclusion"; the number of books in Behemoth is four. Five letters in the word "Leviathan", and four in "Behemoth",combine to produce the word "Beethoven." It is of the essence of devices of this kind that they are merely hints. But one is compelled to look for other hints that Hobbes was writing about Beethoven. Hobbes's manifest blunders reveal his homage to Beethoven. Hobbes writes that Aristotle's Politics depicts ants and bees as political animals (De Cive 5.5, 71). But Aristotle does not mention ants (Politics 1253a). It would be an injustice to deny that Hobbes has a perfect memory. It is a rule of common prudence to ask what Hobbes intended by this error. Later in the same paragraph, Hobbes uses a sentence with the words 'trumpet' and 'thunder and lightning'. We do not think it is coincidence that in the only sentence in the Leviathan where 'trumpet' occurs, Hobbes again mentions thunder and lightning (Leviathan 40, 324). Yet the intelligent reader will see that the context of these words is entirely different in the two books. Why then does Hobbes identify trumpets with thunder and lightning?

[Cain]

http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Leimgruber-et-al.-2010.pdf

Little is known about the ideological relationship between the Swiss political elite and the general public. Based on the SELECTS 2007 candidate and voter surveys, we compare the value orientations of both groups by applying ordinal factor analysis. First, we test whether political leaders or their supporters are more ideologically polarized. Second, we investigate whether ideological congruency between the electorate and representatives varies from party to party. Third, we examine whether winning candidates are ideologically more remote from their party supporters than unsuccessful candidates. We find that ideological polarization is larger within the political elite than within the general public. As a consequence, representatives of parties with rather extreme value orientations represent the moderate electorate rather poorly. Similarly, successful candidates are found to be more distant from their party supporters than unsuccessful candidates. These findings challenge traditional spatial voting theory but accord nicely with the directional model of voting behavior.

[Cain]

Political science is essentially the systemized study of power.  Therefore, in any industry where power relations exist, analogies and concepts from political science can be used to explain the phenomena in question.

Such as rap beefs.

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/27/jay_zs_hegemony_in_the_age_of_kanye

The structure of the balance of power in the rap world continued to evolve towards multipolarity over the last two years, if not an actual hegemonic transition, in the midst of a serious financial crisis afflicting the entire industry -- a situation not unfamiliar to the White House. The relentless rise of southern rap mirrors the economic and political rise of Asia. What had once been a marginal, derivative, and largely dismissed regional genre has risen to be a legitimate contender for hegemony. Lil Wayne and his Young Money label racked up success after success alongside older southern powers like T.I. and newcomers like B.o.B. The West Coast, like Europe, has declined significantly since its old great power days. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg still do their thing, but rarely have a major impact anymore (RIP Nate Dogg, by the way); Detox remains an urban legend, and we'll see if Game's new RED album does better. 50 Cent, a great power only a few years ago, has largely collapsed -- Russia, perhaps? Eminem returned strong after a long struggle with depression to make the ferociously brilliant Recovery album; but like, say, India or Brazil he has always been a powerhouse in his own world, neither influencing nor affected by the wider field.

In short, the environment facing Jay-Z over the last two years was turbulent and challenging, and he could not simply assume continued hegemony despite his track record or skills. Rap's center of gravity was being pulled relentlessly away from its New York roots, taking on a more southern and more international feel. The entire industry faced a massive financial crisis, as the internet and market fragmentation continued to contribute to the steady collapse of the business model for albums and record companies. What is more, there was every reason to view Jay-Z himself as a declining power. While a Jay-Z album could still dominate the rap space as completely as the U.S. military could dominate any global battlespace, that dominance rested on deteriorating foundations. Jay-Z should have seen his skills declining at the age of 41 (yeah, he's 10 months younger than me - and for what it's worth I think his rhymes are better than ever). He could hardly avoid being distracted by the competing pulls of running Def Jam or Roc Nation, and the comforts of marriage to the divine Beyoncé.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Wow!

[Triple Zero]

I think the OWS movement had a pretty clear list of requests. The difference here is that while neocons are already happy to oblige in digging in their heels and creating stubborn resistance to anything the liberals attempt to do while simultanously obfuscating the issue enough to do nothing, Democrats are simply NOT willing to forsake their corporate cronies to appease THEIR constituents.

Moral of the story: your team will get everything it wants as long as its agenda is to take shit away from YOU and give it to the CORPORATION.

But the Democrats aren't on OWS's team. I thought they are protesting against both?

It's a two-party con. Another problem of OWS is that they really don't have a "team", in a political "who to vote for" sense.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Doesnt matter to a republican. Theyre all pretty convinced that occupy is a pawn of the democratic party. Not that the dems didnt try and do that but they didnt quite get it.

[Triple Zero]

That wasn't the point I was trying to make, it doesn't matter to a democrat either, since they bought in to the idea that "their" party will fix everything right.

[Cain]

http://pollsandvotes.com/PaV/2012/04/gas-prices-and-partisan-filters/

Republicans are largely of the view that presidents can do a lot about gas prices, while Democrats are convinced market prices are beyond the power of presidents to control.

Or so it is in 2012. In May 2006, when the CBS News Poll asked this exact question as gas prices spiked during the Bush administration, the partisans had just the opposite theories of presidential control of the economy.

And both times, the people who believed the President could wave a magic oil price wand were retarded.

It could be argued that, in retrospect, Bush could have done something about oil prices by, I don't know, not invading an oil-producing country, causing an insurgency which was put down in a ham-fisted way, nearly 5 years after the invasion.  That makes a certain amount of sense.

But to otherwise affect oil prices, the only option for a President is to release the strategic reserve.  Which can be a problem, when one is possibly being drawn into a conflict with Iran.