Sometimes we political scientists can get a bit too sure of ourselves. I went around telling everyone I knew (including my classes) that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee of the party and all this mishigas about 9-9-9 and racist named hunting sites and whatnot was the opening act for the big show… the coronation of the former Massachusetts governor by a Republican establishment that usually gets what it wants from the nominating process.

That may still happen. But I wonder if we haven’t entered a time in our political life where novelty matters as much as predictability… an era where the “noise” in our statistical models begin to carry more weight than the models themselves?

There are certain times where the social and political world are in such upheaval and parties are so fragmented that party establishments can’t control the process (see Goldwater ’64 or McGovern ’72). But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re simply living in an age where novelty and newness have a cultural currency they didn’t previously have.

As an Internet scholar, I naturally draw things back to the Internet, particularly Facebook in my case. On Facebook, the lingua franca of political talk is the sharing of a link. Shared links on Facebook tend to gather more likes if they carry “high negative or positive valence” in that they elicit strong emotions. As such, the ability of a political campaign to surge or fall because of a “rupture” in the normal operation of a campaign is not created, but exacerbated by social media.

Newt Gingrich’s chiding of Juan Williams and John King in successive South Carolina debates was the very high valence clip that spreads through Facebook and other social media like wildfire.

Does the rise of social media create a new age in presidential politics where the ability to create high valence moments matter more than a candidate’s resume? It’s hard to see Mitt Romney creating high valence moments (except by accident). As such are there dangers ahead for him? Particularly if Florida’s delegates ultimately get apportioned proportionately?

You can still make a case for the “demography is destiny” argument. A social conservative won Iowa. A moderate won New Hampshire. A marginally southern candidate won South Carolina. A more centrist, broad-appeal candidate is going to will Florida. I might have predicted this all along by just looking at demographics or at the very least party ID in each state. But I’m suspicious that there is more unpredictability ahead for this race.

In preparation for my California Politics class, I’m reading some of the antifederalist critiques to the constitution. Some of the core critiques seem ludicrous by today’s standards. For example, the idea that power should be concentrated in states because they more conform to the ideal of a small, homogeneous republic seems absurd, particularly given the size of states like California, New York and Florida.

But other critiques seem more prescient. Particularly one anti-federalist critique of the separation of powers that suggested that true checks and balances required more pronounced social class division. As an example, England had divided government because their houses were brokend down into a House of Commons and a House of Lords. Without legislative branches specifically designed to represent class based interests,

In a system without build in representation by class, “natural aristocracies” would dominate all brances of government. These “few and great” might be lauded for their intellect, ability, character and/or wealth, but the Anti-Federalists thought they represented a class apart from the “common man.” If we interpret “natural aristocracies” to be those that have been able to amass wealth with their talents, this critique becomes prescient. As this chart of the wealth distribution of Congress illustrates, the US Congress sure appears to be more like a “natural” House of Lords than a House of Commons.

The Federalists thought that national goverment would create the diversity of commercial interests necessary to prevent the majority from usurping the rights of the minority… in this case, propoerty owners. The ability to break up class based factions into farmers, laborers, crediters, debtors, etc. means a majority coalition would be difficult to form.

It seems both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were right in this regard. The system protects minority factions from tyrannizing the majority but it also facilitates the capture of government by “natural aristocracises.” Whether they are men of high characther, ability or simply just the lucky or shrewd is for another post, but the fact that wealth is highly correlated with representation was presaged by the Anti-Federalists.

In a state where foolhardiness gets elevated to an artform at times, it’s easy to criticize Jerry Brown for doubling down on high speed rail in his State of the State address today. The much maligned and ridiclued project would seem to be the last thing voters need to be investing scarce resources on. Without passage of a host of tax hikes on the state ballot, K-12 education in the state will be cut drastically. And with a seven year old, I have a vested interested in maintaining quality public education.

But there’s something about Brown stubbornly sticking to his guns on this issue that strikes a resonant chord with me. In the face of declining revenues and blaoted public sectors, it’s refreshing to hear a political figure throw caution to the wind. Maybe the cost overruns on this project will be prohibitive. Maybe Jerry Brown wants to out do his former governor father. Maybe no one will be interested in taking a high speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco (although I would). But the chutzpah involved in saying “we’re going to make this work” in the face of data that would suggest otherwise is heartening. It represents a wisp of faith in public mindedness and the belief that we can still do great things as a polity. The more sober political analyst might see this as a big waste of money, but the former English poetry major sees this as a necessary tonic in California.

Andrew Sullivan has dragged me back into thinking about the Obama Presidency through an essay in Newsweek geared at defending President Obama’s first term. He rightly notes the irony that criticism of the president from the right and the left paint starkly different prictures of the man. From the right:

Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

But the Left sees him as a:

hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.

Sullivan, as he has done in the past, attributes this to a “long game” that Obama is playing where he is less interested in winning short term political battles, but is rather more focused on changing the long term dynamics on policy issues. If he’s indeed in it for the “long game,” then catering to the whims of pundits and partisans that want you to “mix it up” would not serve his ends.

But in an age of constant chatter, is the right type of executive leadership style one which makes no sound? Is Obama trying to get the Republicans to “snatch the pebble from his hand”? It has been interesting to watch. In my head, I try to work through the counterfactuals. What if he pushed back against the Republicans on the debt ceiling issue? Would the outcome have been different? Perhaps? But I am coming more and more to the view that in our Internet/Twitter/Facebook age, we might be best off with a leader who consciously seeks to offer a “non image” of him/herself.

In this Super Collider of ideas, images and identities in which we live, we might be better off with a leader who almost chooses not to place himself into the whirlwind and instead pushes ahead and formulates policy (aggressively when he has a majority, but more conciliatory when he has opposition). Is all this “leading from behind” stuff a recognition that this is an ungovernable electorate. No fireside chat is going to bring the nation together. We live in an ironic, post-authenticity era. Does he know this?

Is this some great, transformational president we are experiencing? Or maybe he’s just really bad at agenda setting and Sullivan (and me by extension, I guess) are giving him way too much credit. Maybe his weaknesses as giving the “big speech” that will bring the country along is just that and nothing more. Maybe caving on the debt ceiling was just a cave and not some grand “rope a dope” strategy?

This puzzle is what makes Obama an interesting figure to observe. He does this politics thing differently and I’m not entirely sure if he does it badly or brilliantly.

Micah Sifry has a great post at TechPresident on the use of Facebook “sentiment analysis” to explain political campagin trends. The gist of the post is that looking at whether negative or positive terms are associated with a candidate on Facebook is of little usefulness because it is impossible to detect irony. So if someone posts that they are “happy” Newt Gingrich is still in the race, it’s difficult to know if that person is saying it as a supporter or as someone who wants Mitt Romney to win. Without knowing other things about the nature of the Facebook user, it becomes impossible to know what “happy” means.

However, in context, it becomes much easier to predict what a poster means when they say they are “happy” a candidate is still in the race. The amount of content individuals post about themselves on social media sites like Facebook or through the profligate use of Google’s array of cloud applications is staggering. By taking all of that data, “data ninjas” can create startlingly accurate models that predict individual human behavior. It has heretofore been difficult to predict behavior in the social world because there is so much individual variability (the problem of inferential statistics as being “mean centric”). But the plethora of self reported data makes it increasingly easier for statisticians to create accurate models of individual behavior. If you are the unit of analysis, then accurately predicting your next move is simply a matter of having enough data. For all of our presumed spontineity, we humans rely a great deal on regularity and routine.

The implications of the product of what I call in an upcoming book the “fully specified self,” where marketers can with increased accuracy predict our behavior and provide us with opportunities to engage in that predictable behavior, are profound. Recent books by Eli Pariser and Jarod Lanier do a nice job detailing the problem with interacting with a medium (the Internet) whose central purpose is to give you back to yourself. I fear that for most of us, the natural response is to become more rigid in our core beliefs.

I wonder if the appropriate response to this is to intentionally break your routine (e.g. post something you disagree with or listen to music from a genre you’ve never heard of). In politics, this might mean consuming media from contrary views. For all the desire we might have to “feel right” about our belifs, we have an important contradictory impulse to live authentically. We want to be right, but we also want our beliefs to actually be right. The Internet does intersting things to this tension, giving us fodder for believing that what we think is right is actually right.

Can Twitter close the political participation gap among racial and ethnic minorities in the US? Digital inequality takes on many guises, from a “new digital divide” that separates those with high speed Internet access from those with slower connection speeds to a gap in the development of the digital skills needed to access Web resources in empowering ways.

The relationship between social connection and political engagement is difficult to wrap one’s arms around. On one hand it creates challenges for democratic life by compeling us to see public life through the lens of our personal networks. But on the flip side, those who value and cultivate connection might be more disposed to benefit from social media. A recent Pew survey found that Blacks and Latinos in the United States were significantly more likely than whites to be “early adopters” of Twitter.

Without looking deeper into the data, I can’t produce a good answer as to why this is the case, but one suspicion I have is that Blacks and Latinos in the US are more prone to communitarian values than non Hispanic-whites in the US who might be more individualistic in their world view (broad generalization, I know). If this is the case, Blacks and Latinos might be more drawn to the ability to forge and sustain community via Twitter. Twitter allows for the development of connections based on communities of interest. As such, they are more oriented to the formation of new, much thinner, bonds than is Facebook, which is mostly based on pre-existing networks.

A research question I am currently purusing with Jessica Lavariega Monforti at the University of Texas-Pan American asks whether acquiring digital skills leads to increased feelings of trust and efficacy among Blacks and Latinos in the US as compared to Non-Hispanic Whites in the US. If the proposition that Blacks and Latinos are more prone to a communitarian world view and hence forming thin-tie social networks via Twitter, then the social network could be a source for closing the civic and social divide in America. Too early to tell of course, but an interesting research journey to embark upon.

In my google reader feed sit two blog posts back to back. One called The New War on Science by Daniel Honan calls “climate change deniers” to task for ignoring what he sees as a near-unanimous consensus on the reality of man-made global warming.

Right next to that post is one called Climate Showing Some Resistance to CO2, which notes that:

Oregon State researchers estimate that “the most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C.” The data was taken from ice cores, fossils and marine sediments that data back to the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago.

Given the fact that we can’t know with 100 percent certainty that global warming will destroy the planet, how should the non scientist process this information to make policy judgments?

The following is a guest post by Catalan journalist Lluís de Nadal Alsina. He’s worked for four years at Public Catalan Television, and now serves as a reporter at the private TV station, 8TV.

In Catalan:

Xenofòbia en una Catalunya dividida

El Rubén i la Mai passegen amb els seus tres American Pit Bulls pels carrers foscos i freds de Salt un vespre plujós de novembre. “Jo sense els meus gossos no surto”, diu ella, “molts moros m’han amenaçat que em violarien”. Ell, que s’autodefineix com a “racista”, es queixa que la majoria de magrebins a Salt viuen de robar o vendre droga i que està fart de veure com van “amb Audis A6” quan ell no pot pagar-se “ni un ciclomotor”. Tots dos estan a l’atur i esperen un fill, que no volen que creixi aquí.

Només uns minuts després, des de la mateixa zona, comencen a sentir-se crits de “Racistes, fora de Salt!”. Una manifestació d’immigrants subsaharians i magrebins es dirigeix cap al poliesportiu on la Plataforma per Catalunya de Josep Anglada està a punt de començar el primer acte de la campanya de les eleccions del 20N. Un cordó policial els barra el pas per evitar els enfrontaments d’altres ocasions. “Salt és una olla a pressió”, em diu un Mosso d’Esquadra, “qualsevol espurna ho fa saltar tot. Aquí no hi ha convivència, la gent se suporta”.

En el context actual de crisi, polvorins com el de Salt, amb un 50% d’immigració, són el caldo de cultiu de l’onada de xenofòbia que escombra Europa. Amb la por a l’Islam com a únic argument electoral, partits neo populistes ja s’han fet un lloc als parlaments d’una dotzena de països de la Unió Europea. Mentrestant, els partits tradicionals coquetegen amb el racisme per mantenir el suport del seu electorat. La vella Europa, bastió de la democràcia i la llibertat, cedeix davant del populisme i la xenofòbia.

Dinamarca, per exemple, va reinstaurar els controls fronterers per frenar la immigració il·legal, en un moviment que va provocar consternació entre els seus veïns europeus, ja que el Tractat de Shengen va abolir l’any 1995 les fronteres internes; França va deportar l’any passat gairebé 10.000 gitanos rumanesos; i Suïssa va prohibir la construcció de minerets a les mesquites. La massacre d’Oslo, perpetrada per l’ultra dretà Anders Behring Breivik, ha demostrat que l’odi i el fanatisme latents poden defermar episodis puntuals d’extrema barbàrie.

A Espanya, en plena campanya electoral, el candidat de CiU Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida es mostrava “preocupat perquè neixin més Mohammed que José” o perquè “els catalans perdem la nostra identitat”. La líder del PP català Alícia Sánchez Camacho proclamava que “el burka s’havia de prohibir a tot el país”. Per primera vegada a la història de la democràcia espanyola, un líder xenòfob, Josep Anglada, podria arribar al Congrés.

“A por ellos”, crida Anglada. És la traca final del míting a Salt davant d’un centenar de fanàtics que aplaudeixen enfervorits cada vegada que deixa anar un comentari racista, com que “d’aquí poc no sabrem si vivim a Catalunya o l’Afganistan”.

Hores abans, a Vic, la seva ciutat natal i feu electoral, Anglada mostra una cara ben diferent. A la plaça Major, reparteix ell mateix propaganda electoral durant tot el matí, saludant pel seu nom pràcticament tothom qui s’acosta a la paradeta de PxC. Es treballa cada vot amb un somriure.

Amb l’habilitat de qui s’ha mogut sempre al límit de la democràcia -va ser membre de l’organització d’ultradreta franquista Fuerza Nueva-, esquiva les meves preguntes. “Jo no sóc radical”, m’interromp, “només sóc l’altaveu de la gent, que ja s’ha cansat del políticament correcte”.

Parlant amb els ciutadans de Vic, un s’adona que el seu discurs ha calat fons. “S’han de dir les coses pel seu nom”, em diu un veí passejant per la plaça, “no pot ser que els d’aquí de tota la vida hagin hagut de marxar perquè se’ls ha omplert el barri d’immigrants. Ningú els vol al costat. Si un marroquí ve a viure al teu bloc, el teu pis perd valor automàticament.” “La gent calla”, afegeix, “però tothom vota Anglada”.

Rafael Jorba, periodista i autor del llibre “La mirada del otro. Manifiesto por la alteridad”, m’explica que “no estem davant d’un problema de discursos, sinó de recursos”. “Amb l’augment de la immigració, els que van arribar fa 30 anys i els que arriben ara s’han de repartir les beques menjador o la renda mínima d’inserció. La lluita és entre pobres i miserables.”

“En època de crisi”, continua Jorba, “els únics governs que resisteixen són els que millor administren les pors. Però el futur no es construeix a partir de les pors, sinó de les esperances. Tot i que l’Europa actual sigui una foto sèpia, una imatge fixe del passat, ha de venir una nova generació capaç d’administrar les esperances. Més tard o més d’hora, els indignats de la Spanish Revolution o del moviment Occupy Wall Street governaran. Ells han crescut en aquesta crisi, però han vist molt món gràcies a les beques Erasmus o als vols low cost”.

El futur, però, avui sembla encara molt lluny de Vic o de Salt. “No entenc per què nosaltres hem de ser els dolents de la pel·lícula”, es queixa una marroquina. El seu únic desig és poder-li donar un futur a la seva filla de tres anys, però està preocupada perquè a la guarderia pública on la porta el 100% dels alumnes són immigrants. Mentre xerrem al mercat de Vic, ens insulten dues vegades perquè sembla ser que el cotxet està bloquejant el pas.

In light of the Occupy Wall street protests across the nation picking up steam (check out this video from Oakland) it is worth looking back on the sources of the protest. Here is the best video I’ve been able to find that explains the mortgage crisis.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Michael Weiss offers a provocative argument for why the OWS/99 movement faces serious challenges:

OWS sees itself as a battalion against a lifestyle and a mindset that people don’t, in fact, deplore so much as they do the ruin that that lifestyle and mindset causes. Until the movement figures out how reconcile this uniquely American contradiction, and account reasonably for why it exists, OWS will only be subject to further derision and dismissal.

Andrew Sullivan references a classic scene from the movie Boiler Room to support this point.

What do you think of Weiss’ argument?

The Occupy Wall Street protests have garnered a great deal of attention in recent weeks. The core argument is that the “top one percent” has gotten a free ride in the last few decades, particularly during the last few years where the financial sector has seemingly not been held to account for their role in the financial crisis. But who is the “top one percent”?

Suzy Khimm on Ezra Klein’s blog sheds light on this question.

You’d be in the top 1 percent of U.S. households if your income in 2010 was at least $516,633. Your net worth in 2007 was $8,232,000 or more, and your average income this year is $1,530,773.

Khimm also shares some charts from Dave Gilson that looks deeper into who these “1 percenters” really are. In this chart, he notes that those in the top one percent have a broad range of professions. You’ll note from the chart than only 14 percent come from the financial sector, and a scant 2 percent are classified as “entrepreneurs.” As a side note, how did any professors make this list (1.8 percent)!

This data doesn’t play into the story the “99 percenters” want to tell about the “top 1 percent.” The preferred narrative is that the top one percent come from the financial sector (e.g. their wealth is not earned in the same way an entrepreneur’s wealth is earned).

But another of Gilson’s charts does help the 99 percenter’s story. According to this chart, the top one percent owns a majority share of the nation’s stock/mutual funds, securities, and business equity) when compared to the “bottom 90 percent.”

What does this say about the validity of the Occupy Wall street movement? Should they be focusing their efforts on challenging concentrated wealth regardless of whether it is in the financial sector or not? Or is Wall Street the perfect villain? It is easier to claim that Gordon Gekko should pay more in taxes (Yah….that was his name. I know, we weren’t very ironic in the 1980’s). Does it matter if the story of who constitutes the “top 1 percent” is more muddled if the objective is met? Do the means justify the ends?