Sunday, November 17, 2002 :::
I sent the women of the Kitchen Cabinet an email the other day related to global warming, which they've been discussing, and I included a link to this article suggesting that it would be cheaper to adapt to global warming than to prevent it.
In finding said article (which I had read earlier, but had to Google for), I ran across this theoretical political science article by the same fellow. Coincidentally, future Supreme Court Justice Eugene Volokh asked yesterday:
Does anyone have any facts, or even plausible conjectures, on how many votes Republicans would gain on balance if they shifted towards a more libertarian position?
The poli-sci article I linked to is, as I say, theoretical; it also assumes, at points, a parliamentary system (the author is Danish). But most of it seems to apply to the American system, and it does provide "a model with alienation [for which] it is shown that parties will not move out to compensate for losses at the fringes but actually move closer to the center." That quote is from the abstract; I haven't read the whole article, but page 22 seems to be where it starts getting into that sort of issue. Models used in earlier sections (i.e., the parts I've read) tended to assume a distribution of voters with a buldge in the middle, so intuitively one can reason that moving to the extreme to pick up a few outlying voters will be less profitable than moving toward the larger number of voters in the middle.
I happen to think that aspect of the model is likely to be right. It's not complete, though. The author acknowledges he doesn't incorporate in his model the strategy of trying to lead the voters into changing their positions, a practice which might score one for the extremists. It's also true (at least in my experience) that the "base" of the party, which works to get out voters and create a general aura of competence and warm, happy goodness around the party and its candidates, tends to be more ideologically extreme than the voters for the party. In other words, a move toward the center to try to pick up votes might cause a party to have fewer people working for it, and therefore some of the targeted centrists might not hear the message or develop a strong impression of the party or its candidates.
Personally, I support a pragmatic, gradual dragging of the party toward a more libertarian position. If we were consistently winning 60% of the vote, I'd be demanding it; if the Democrats controlled Congress, the most I'd hope for from my fellow Republicans would be to not give up ground, but to work on changing the discussion to issues we own. With a narrow majority, I don't think we should fight losing battles, but I think there are places we can act. I think a minority of the public supports individual accounts for social security, but that increasingly seems like an area where we can get a foot in the door -- I think just trying to get individual accounts, with very little discretion for actually directing the investments, is the place to start on that. School choice is probably a lot tougher, or at least riskier -- I think we could alienate a lot of suburban voters, but start picking up some urban minority voters. Now is definitely not the time to aim for actual decreases in government spending, but we should be able to hold spending to a constant or slightly decreasing portion of GDP.
Within Massachusetts, of course, almost anything we can do to elect legislators is acceptable to me. I have Republican friends who hate, for example, State Senator Brian Lees, but as long as only 15% of the Senate is Republican, we should try to keep him in there. Especially in the district he represents, he's the best we're going to do, at least for now.
For the record, I was a Libertarian once. My positions haven't changed so much as my ideas about how best to achieve them.
::: posted by Steven at 7:26 AM
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