If I were a political theorist, or if I were capable to do an in-depth qualitative case study, I would pick something related to the origins and evolution of so-called “legal traditions”–and freedom of speech would rank very high on which traditions to study.

The Exceptional First Amendment
FREDERICK SCHAUER
Harvard University – John F. Kennedy School of Government
February 2005
KSG Working Paper No. RWP05-021

Abstract:
As is increasingly apparent, the United States is a free speech and free press outlier. With respect to a large range of issues – defamation, hate speech, publication of information about ongoing legal proceedings, incitement to violence or illegal conduct, and many others – the United States stands alone, not only as compared to totalitarian states, but also in comparison with other open liberal constitutional democracies.

The reasons for this divergence are common, but among the explanations are the complexities of the trans-national migration of legal and constitutional ideas, differential commitments to libertarian visions as a matter of basic political theory, differences in the constitutional text, differences in political and legal history, differences in the role of various interest groups, and differences in views about constitutionalism and the role of the courts. This paper attempts to explore in an explanatory but non-evaluative way the causes of American free speech exceptionalism.

Cognitive biases are pervasive: They affect experts and non-experts. Experts and highly-educated persons may want to believe that they know better than making judgments based on irrational or poor information–but apparently they do not, according to Tetlock.

Among intellectuals, are academic experts any better than political pundits or journalists? In academia, competition may filter out the worst forecasts and the more biased forecasters–but that is a BIG maybe. In politics, on the other hand, persuasion, rhetoric and symbols matter much more than logical consistency or evidence. Again, Tetlock says no.

This is from The New Yorker (5-dec-05):

EVERYBODY’s AN EXPERT by LOUIS MENAND

Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome.

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.

Tetlock picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.

(…)The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

(…)Specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts.

Myths and Realities of American Political Geography
Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward
http://nber15.nber.org/papers/w11857.pdf

ABSTRACT
The division of America into red states and blue states misleadingly suggests that states are split into two camps, but along most dimensions, like political orientation, states are on a continuum. By historical standards, the number of swing states is not particularly low, and America’s cultural divisions are not increasing.

But despite the flaws of the red state/blue state framework, it does contain two profound truths. First, the heterogeneity of beliefs and attitudes across the United States is enormous and has always been so. Second, political divisions are becoming increasingly religious and cultural. The rise of religious politics is not without precedent, but rather returns us to the pre-New Deal norm. Religious political divisions are so common because religious groups provide politicians the opportunity to send targeted messages that excite their base.

Ya vieron el mecanismo de votación del TUCOM? La ponderación de los votos fue como sigue:

–10% con base en los votos de los ocho tucomistas
–40% con base en 1400 notables encuestados (dicen que como la mitad contestó–un muy alto nivel de abstencionismo, considerando que los notables son gente informada, cívica y patriótica).
–50% con base en una encuesta a 6000 no notables o meros mortales.

Esta votación es un híbrido curioso de votos anónimos pero no idénticos: el voto de un tucomista valía más de diez veces más que el de un notable, y el de éstos a su vez valía mucho más que el de un mero mortal. ¡Ni siquiera Big Brother hubiera cocinado tal fórmula!

Dice “Transparencia Mexicana” que de acuerdo a sus muy transparentes cómputos ganó Montiel.

Y claro, en aras de la transparencia no se puede saber el nombre y número de los notables que SI contestaron, ni los porcentajes de ganadores y perdedores tanto entre notables como entre meros mortales. No vaya a ser que, sabiendo tales porcentajes, los tucomistas decidan romper su pacto o le vendan sus market share a Madrazo.

Preguntas del ácido: ¿Si tuvieras que elegir entre eliminar a los notables o a los meros mortales, a quién descartarías? ¿Madrazo vs. Montiel?

Stiglitz is going at it again.  This is a very nice paper where the authors tackle not only Shleifer & Co. but also Coase and many Coasean wannabes…

The Creation of the Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Property: The Political and Economic Consequences of a Corrupt Privatization
Joseph E. Stiglitz and Karla Hoff
NBER Working Paper No. 11772
November 2005
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w11772.pdf

ABSTRACT
How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? We investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-Communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have “stolen” assets cannot be fully protected under a change in the legal regime towards rule of law, and that the number of agents with control rights over assets is large. We show that a demand for broadly beneficial legal reform may not emerge because the expectation of weak legal institutions increases the expected relative return to stripping assets, and strippers may gain from a weak and corrupt state. The outcome can be inefficient even from the narrow perspective of the asset-strippers.

From the paper conclusions:

“At the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the states owned assets of immense value that had been created in some cases by collective efforts over a period of 70 years. The privatization of state enterprises increased private opportunities for wealth creation, but also—given the absence of effective corporate governance systems—for theft. We showed that even when all agents are better off building value in the rule of law state than stripping assets in a lawless environment, once agents have engaged in asset stripping, at least some of them will have in an interest in prolonging a weak, corrupt state that does not interfere with their theft. Thus, the path of institutional change can be inefficient even from the narrow point of view of the asset strippers, who do not internalize the effect of their economic choices on how the political environment evolves.”

This is Brad DeLong on Easterly’s book, The Elusive Quest for Growth:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Easterly_neoliberal.html

Today the industrialized world as a whole is embarked–half-heartedly, I admit–on yet another crusade to try to make the poorer parts of the world rich. The ideology behind this crusade–an ideology that I believe in–is called “neoliberalism.” It has two guiding principles. The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible). The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises (hence save for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize).

However, this neoliberal crusade is not the first such crusade for economic development. Since World War II there have been at least six such crusades: the “building socialism” crusade, the “financing gap” crusade, the “import substitution” crusade, the “aid for education” crusade, the “oil money recycling” crusade, and the “population boom” crusade. All of them failed to spark rapid economic development. Does what went wrong then have any lessons to tell us about the future of the crusade we are undertaking now? Yes–and now is a good time to take a look back at the history of crusades-for-development since World War II, for World Bank economist Bill Easterly has just written The Elusive Quest for Growth (published by MIT Press), his own take on the largely dismal history of government-led programs to spark development.

(…)

In Easterly’s view, there are a few big lessons from the history: “Prosperity happens when all the players in the development game have the right incentives. It happens when government incentives induce technological adaptation, high-quality investment in machines, and high-quality schooling. It happens when donors face incentives that induce them to give aid to countries with good policies where aid will have high payoffs, not to countries with poor policies where aid is wasted. It happens when the poor get good opportunities and incentives… It happens when politics is not polarized between antagonistic interest groups, but there is a common consensus to invest in the future. Broad and deep development happens when a government that is held accountable for its actions energetically takes up the task of investing in collective goods like health, education, and the rule of law…”

It is clear that the neoliberal policy prescriptions–try to make government honest and smaller (so it doesn’t have its fingers in as many economic decisions), try to keep the macroeconomy stable, and boost world trade and thus cross-border economic links as much as possible–affect only a small proportion of these requirements for successful economic development. Neoliberal policy prescriptions have little ability to create governments that energetically invest in collective goods, a political system that enforces accountability, a national consensus for growth, and a commitment by donors to reward success only.

Thus there is a sense in which neoliberalism as we know it is a counsel of despair. Most of what is needed is beyond its reach. The hope is that privatization and world economic integration will in the long run help create the rest of the preconditions for successful development. But we are playing this card not because we think it is a winner, but because it is the last one in our hand.

Más sobre el tema:

• “Globalization” and “Neoliberalism” | Brad @Delong (1999) http://ow.ly/nBfIc 
• Neoliberalism: The last development crusade | Brad @Delong (2001) http://ow.ly/nBfKH 
• Has Neo-Liberalism Failed Mexico? | Brad @DeLong (Sept. 2006) http://ow.ly/nBfN6 
• Problema: las alternativas al neoliberalismo no son tan liberales http://ow.ly/nBg8G 

Food for thought

Beware of Economists Bearing Advice: “Beware of Economists Bearing Advice

Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson

(Policy Options 18, no. 7 (September, 1997): 16-19.)

(comments in brackets are mine)

“Beware of economists bearing advice. Though some of it is valuable, the framework of theoretical welfare economics from which economic advice usually issues has serious normative limitations and distortions. When economists go beyond identifying consequences of policies to making recommendations, they typically rely on a theory whose only normative concern is welfare and its distribution and that mistakenly identifies welfare with the satisfaction of preferences [what if your preferences are bad for you?, or if you do not know what is best for you?]. Their advice about how to increase welfare must accordingly be regarded with caution, and policy makers must not forget that increasing welfare should not be their only goal. [what about the other dimensions of freedom and happiness other than preference-satisfaction?]”

“The sensible policy maker needs to understand the limitations of welfare economics and to regard its policy recommendations with skepticism. Welfare economics vulgarizes the problems of policy making by its limited concern with only one moral objective — the enhancement of well-being — and by its distorted identification of well-being with the satisfaction of preferences. The pronouncements of welfare economics must therefore be treated with caution. The recommendations — like providing cash in favor of in-kind benefits — seem so straightforward, and the arguments — like the one we have examined — so watertight. But what makes welfare economics so clear cut is that so much has been left out and that what has been left in has been distorted. Sometimes the omissions and distortions may not matter, but policy makers had better understand the limitations of the framework economists employ.”

Beyond constitutional design at large and economic policy, the devil is in the details of the budgetary process.  This paper has a nice dataset for 28 countries.

Who Controls the Budget: The Legislature or the Executive?
Ian Lienert
URL:http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:05/115&r=pol

Country-specific factors prevent a strong linear relationship between the legislature’s budgetary powers and the extent of its separation from the executive. Electoral and voting systems, bicameralism, constitutional and legal constraints, voluntary contracts of political parties, and long-standing traditions all influence the relative budgetary powers of executives and legislatures. Differences in the legislature’s budgetary authority in twenty-eight countries with five different forms of government are examined. It is concluded that differences in budgetary powers within a particular form of government are as great as those between different forms of government.
Keywords: Budgets , Legislation , Budgetary policy ,