Daily Archives: July 20, 2011

El arreglo político de Elba

Posted on by

Esta es mi opinión sobre el “arreglo político” de Elba Esther, en CNN México.

El arreglo de Elba Esther

En las últimas semanas se ha hablado mucho sobre el “arreglo político” entre el presidente Felipe Calderón  y Elba Esther Gordillo. No debe sorprender que la opinión pública tenga gran interés en escudriñar lo que hubo detrás de dicho arreglo que, según la misma Gordillo, siempre fue evidente y “no le avergüenza”. ¿Este tipo de acuerdos son ominosos o son un síntoma natural de toda democracia? Desde un punto de vista pragmático, puede decirse que los intercambios de favores (quid pro quo) son un elemento natural de la política y que, después de todo, esto se sabía desde 2006.

Vayamos por partes. Algo sabíamos de este arreglo pero lo cierto es que aún no se sabe todo. Para muchos, la más clara evidencia del pacto son los cargos que Calderón concedió a cuadros cercanos a la maestra: la Subsecretaría de Educación Básica, así como las direcciones del ISSSTE, del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública, y la Lotería Nacional. En efecto, no son pocas concesiones pero ¿cuál fue el otro lado de la transacción?

Aquí encontrarán el resto de la columna.

Temas relacionados:

Political science and policy relevance

Posted on by

Dan Drezner shares a very interesting essay on political science and policy relevance, by Erik Gartzke.

In the policy relevance debate, political scientists are like Renfield, Dracula’s sidekick (or possibly like Thomas the Tank engine if children are present).  We really want to be “useful.”  I know of no other discipline that is so angst-ridden about mattering, even those that don’t matter in any concrete, “real world” sense.  Obviously, what makes us different from poets, particle physicists, or Professors of Pediatric Oncology is that we study politics and occasionally imagine that this gives us some special salience to that subject.  Policy makers, too, want us to be “relevant,” though I think what they have in mind differs in important respects.

(…)

What makes political science different from most other fields is that we have failed to resolve our conflict with our subject matter.  Poets report the human condition.  They do not expect to alter it, at least not permanently.  Physicians can make you better, so they do intervene, but their detachment is credible in the sense that they do not want to become illnesses.  No physicist I know of hankers to _be_ her subject matter, though of course we are all of us made of matter.  Political science alone wants to be different but engaged.

Imagine suggesting to a congressional committee that Congress should abandon the forecasting models of the OMB as esoteric and speculative.  Try to suggest to someone like Paul Pillar that he should hanker after the “good old days” of pre-GDP census taking and data collection.  Economics became policy relevant in the first sense because it developed tools that could help policy makers better connect their actions with outcomes.  These are not perfect, as recent events illustrate, but they work better than the old way of doing things (i.e. whatever we did last time, or holding one’s thumb up to the wind).  The problem is that political science does not yet have “killer apps” like GDP.  Optimists would say we are still working on these things.  Pessimists would say that they will never come.  I will not weigh in on that debate because in some sense it does not matter.

You can read the whole thing here.