That Amazon weaponizes this popularity so as to politically reinforce its monopoly power is a not unimportant consideration when one wants to weigh up the pros and cons pure.mpg.de/rest/items/ite…
One crude - but nonetheless useful - understanding of contemporary US capitalism is to see it as a tacit alliance between consumers and monopolists against workers. If your universal metric of general wellbeing is consumer welfare, then that looks like a good thing.
If, alternatively, you are worried about power imbalances in the economy and distributional outcomes, that looks considerably more problematic. bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Kathy Thelen and her collaborators are investigating (among other things) how the politics differ greatly depending on whether you have a tacit monopolist-consumer coalition as in US, or a tacit worker-consumer coalition as in some parts of the US pure.mpg.de/rest/items/ite…
Certainly, there are a lot of implicit value judgments in the European approach, which suggests e.g. that citizenship and work conditions are tied up together. Equally, there are a lot of unexamined value judgments in privileging consumer welfare over workers' conditions.
[some parts of the EU that should be]
This paragraph from Culpepper and Thelen makes the crucial point, which is much less broadly understood than it should be.
2. What Marion and I are contributing is a piece on what we call "High Tech Modernism." It will be part of the special issue (which @margaretlevi and I are editing), and we're excited to see it going out into the world (draft is available at dropbox.com/s/3wy36804jhlc… ).
3. The idea behind it is pretty simple, but, we think, useful. James Scott has famously written about the "High Modernism" of the 19th and 20th century - the process of bureaucratic categorization and information collection that reshaped the world and made it "legible."
1. There are a lot of people in political science today complaining that John Eastman is speaking at APSA 2021 and suggesting APSA should do something about it. My opinions of Eastman and his memo are exactly what you'd expect given my past writing washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-cyni… But ...
2. The complaints - if they are more than just popcorn throwing, don't seem particularly deeply thought out. I say this as someone who has co-chaired an APSA meeting in the past but has no current role in the organization beyond membership and is speaking purely as an individual.
3. The first point is that APSA-as-an-organization has much less power over who does or does not attend its meetings than people seem to believe. There are some theme panels that the chairs can put together, and other places where there is a little wriggle room ...
1. A thread on this comparison by @michaelbd of Orban's Hungary with De Valera's Ireland nationalreview.com/2021/08/hungar…. As said earlier, I don't think that the comparison works. Here's why- for the huge audience for 20th century Irish history/ 21st century Hungary politics crossovers.
2. Dougherty's argument is that Orban - like De Valera - is the leader of a small country trying to preserve itself in the face of a big hostile world. And that explains much of Orban's strategy and his appeal. There are some things that explains - but much more that it does not.
3. First - as Dougherty says, Orban is genuinely popular, as Dev was. And he could go further. One reason for Dev's success was that he offered a different and more populist conservatism as an alternative to the then frugal "Treasury View" type Cumann na nGaedheal government.
1. A thread, responding to a series of complaints about political science by @BrankoMilan which seem to me to be generally quite wrong-headed. Note before beginning - while I've only the most tenuous personal acquaintance with him, I think his work is very good and use it.
with the suggestion that political scientists were caught "totally flat-footed when Piketty produced a slew of cross-country data showing the transformation of labor parties into the parties of an educated elite."
complaining that political scientists did not seem interested in studying "comparative democracy & voting patterns" outside 20 odd developed countries. Both tweets provoked howls of outrage
1. So this went up yesterday - preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/0… - and I'm very happy with it - @seanmcarroll questions and sense of how the various arguments pulled together meant that I sound far more coherent than I usually feel.
2. As noted in the interview, anything genuinely intelligent-sounding that I said should likely be attributed to the co-authors whom I am leaning on heavily throughout. We discussed work with Cosma Shalizi, with @hugoreasoning and Melissa Schwartzberg, and with Marion Fourcade .
3. Also, by sheer coincidence (the interview took place a couple of months ago), we talked about the main themes of a report by @schneierblog and I that @SNFAgoraJHU published yesterday on the current state of American democracy. It's here - snfagora.jhu.edu/publication/re…
1. Some repercussions from this that may not be obvious to non-academics. This is going to be a very big blow to the University of North Carolina. Universities live in a reputation system - and UNC has just taken a big hit to its credibility.
2. First - the Board has substantially damaged the university's ability to attract good professors. If you are a young professor, and you are lucky enough that you can choose among a couple of tenure track jobs, you are going to be less likely to want to go to to UNC.
3. Why would you want to gamble on the decision of a board of trustees that has to approve your tenure case, and will shoot down candidates because of their politics? It's an additional risk - especially in a country where political controversies can come out of nowhere.