Jacob Christensen

Crikey… I just discovered that Dmitri Medvedev is nine months younger than me. And whoever wins the US presidential election will be older than Medvedev – even Barack Obama.

You know, there was a time when the guys running the Soviet Union were not just old, but really, really, really old. If it wasn’t for the good old Chinese…

It is always fascinating when you have more than one set of variables in play or when the cause-effect link is more complicated than you imagined.

Consider this simple question: Why do regimes turn democratic?

There are many possible answers: It could be for political reasons (to create support for the regime), for economic reasons (greater transparency and efficiency), for internal reasons, for external reasons, because of popular demand or because actors force democratisation upon the regime.

And how about this: Should you democratise first and then liberalise the economy – or expect that a liberal economy leads to the adoption of a democratic form of government? And what about economic crises – do they lead to authoritarianism or democratisation? And what about climate change, now we’re at it?

As it is, a couple of VoxEU posts (and the underlying research) suggest this pattern:

The first one is: Economic liberalisation does not lead to greater support or demand for a democratic form of government. On the other hand, having a democratic government in a country increases the legitimacy of a liberal economy.

The second one is: Economic hardship – in the form of droughts – is linked with democratisation, at least in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So maybe, if you want, economic liberalisation a severe economic crisis followed by democratisation is the best way to go.

The next question is how this squares with Fareed Zakaria’s claim (from 2003) that – provided a country isn’t based on an extractive economy – a GDP above 6000 USD per inhabitant is linked with a clear move towards democracy. GDP, of cause, measures wealth, not the degree of economic liberalisation.

Offered by Tim Anderson of the Copenhagen Report blog.

Oh, and even if you’re not going to Copenhagen, but just looking for a house or an apartment, this entry with its shrewd insight into market psychology is worth reading. (And in case you wonder, the estate agents tell us that everything is fine and that 2008 will be a really good year…yeah, right)

Inspired by the “Greatest Conservative” and “Greatest Liberal” publication, Tyler Cowen discusses John Rawls:

The bottom line is that you can’t get lexical orderings out of a moral theory unless you build them in upfront. And without lexical orderings, well, Rawls, like many illustrious minds before him, does not succeed in sidestepping the dirty mess of aggregation. The critical moral question is how we should compare the interests of some people to others in a real world setting; don’t expect to find an easy way out of that one.

And just to prove that economists can indeed be witty:

Matt Yglesias adds commentary; he notes, correctly, that for the current Left Rawls doesn’t offer such an inspiring vision. I’ll put it this way: if you have to work that hard to establish “Sweden is great,” you should be spending more money on plane tickets.

Here’s a quote from Yglesias’s comment:

Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family by contrast seems to me to have a much more clear and direct relevance to things people argue about today. The premise that women and men deserve political and social equality is something few people would disagree with these days, but Okin shows that some surprisingly radical conclusions about the status quo can follow from that in a way that’s relevant in some obvious ways to arguments that you see in the cut-and-thrust of contemporary practical political debates. Rawls has created something vastly more theoretically ambitious, but in part in virtue of that ambition it’s much less clear what the actual implications are.

I’ll just note that Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen is on a week-end visit to George W. Bush’s Texan ranch. Danish media is following the event closely.

One thing worth noting is that Anders Fogh Rasmussen is unique in that Danish participation in the Iraq war hasn’t hurt his domestic position in any way and now that Denmark has withdrawn from Iraq, the issue is basically non-existing in Danish politics.

• cnet – A day with the ‘MythBusters’
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• Marginal Revolution: Which work of American liberal political thought has held up best?
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• The Monkey Cage: The Facts about Doctoral Degree Completion in Political Science
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I’m by no means a polling or statistics expert but I know that when you read a report about a poll, the numbers are useless unless you get some idea of how the data were collected and computed. And we haven’t even got to the margin of error-thing yet.

Anyway, Mark Blumenthal has collected and published this set of data about the composition of the samples different polling organisations have used in the run-up to the Democratic primary in Texas.

To quote Blumenthal’s own observation:

…the results show considerable variation, particularly on the Latino or Hispanic percentage of the samples, which vary from a low of 24-26% (ARG) to a high of 39% (Post/ABC). Other categories also show wide variation including the percentages of African Americans (from 14% to 23%), women (from 51% to 58%) and voters over 65 years of age (from 15% to 30%; comparisons by age categories are especially difficult, since no two pollsters report exactly the same age breaks).

Worth remembering when you read the varying predictions of the Texas primary.