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Strategic Voting on Super Tuesday

Mike Edwards, co-author (with Danny Oppenheimer) of Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well, on voting "strategically" and Super Tuesday. Mike founded and regularly contributes to Leftfielder.org, a blog on politics and media.

 

I grew up in a very liberal neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, surrounded by people who thought that Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson were clearly the two most qualified men in the country to be President. Yet, virtually all of those people fell neatly in-line behind the Democratic Party nominee every November—and in most years, by the time the Spring caucuses rolled around they had already thrown their support behind a slightly less palatable, but perhaps more electable, candidate.

In short, they were faced with the same set of options now confronting Republican voters; when, and how, should one vote “strategically”? We all vote strategically—or for candidates who aren’t our first choice—and it is really a very rational approach to a winner-take-all election. The problem is that strategic voting ultimately relies on a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cause voters to abandon preferred candidates prematurely.

Take the Georgia election in the upcoming March 6 Super Tuesday primary. Recent polling in Georgia, according to the analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times 538 blog, showed that Newt Gingrich holds a sizeable lead in Georgia, his home state and a place where he remains popular. Clearly he will win the state on Super Tuesday, right?

If the election were held in a vacuum, perhaps.  Unfortunately for Gingrich, those Georgia voters have been feeling significant pressure  leading up to Super Tuesday to vote strategically. Gingrich’s candidacy is no longer taken seriously outside of Georgia. Which means that, heading into Super Tuesday, those pro-Gingrich voters will have basically three choices:

1)   Vote for Gingrich, despite the fact that it looks increasingly unlikely that Gingrich can win the nomination.

2)   Vote for their second-place candidate—most analysts believe this to be Rick Santorum—because he has a more realistic chance to win the nomination.

3)   Vote for whichever candidate they believe to be the inevitable nominee—most analysts believe this to be Mitt Romney—because of a desire to end the primary process quickly.

The irony, of course, is that Gingrich might have a chance to win the nomination if not for strategic voting concerns—or “momentum” as the pundits often call it. Until recently, after all, Gingrich had a sizeable lead in Georgia, and was seen as a viable contender in the other Super Tuesday states, especially Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and the various Western caucuses. But as voters in Michigan watched a few thousand caucus-goers in Colorado and Minnesota choose Santorum as their preferred non-Romney candidate, they decided to follow suit. And now, as Santorum is coming off a respectable 2nd place showing in Michigan, and holding a small lead in the Ohio polls, he has positioned himself as the “only viable” non-Romney candidate in all of those other Southern and Western states. This has in turn left Georgia as Gingrich’s last chance to demonstrate his “viability”—or perhaps as the place where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Gingrich’s doom finally comes to fruition.

 

Monday Eye Candy: Sidewalks

Last week, we featured photographs from Paul Shaw's Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. Today's eye candy is Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht. Sidewalks contains 35 black and white photos to illustrate the authors' examination of the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

(A hotdog stand, at times considered sidewalk clutter, Los Angeles Fashion District, December 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

(City Walk, Universal City, California, 2002)

 

 

 

 

 

(Masked riders throwing beads, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Lousiana, 2006)

 

 

 

(Police in front of the boarded buildings at the World Trade Organization meetings, Seattle, Washington, 1999)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Canopied street, Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, 2006)

Happy Holidays! We will resume the Monday Eye Candy feature in the New Year (1/9/12).

Soviet Coup and Science

Paul Josephson, author of Lenin's Laureate: Zhores Alferov's Life in Communist Science, on the August 1991 Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

 

Twenty years ago, on a hot summer day in late August, communist hardliners staged a coup to depose Mikhail Gorbachev. They rejected Gorbachev’s reforms of perestroika that had led to political liberalization if economic uncertainly, and to widespread questioning of communist orthodoxy. Indeed, on August 20, 1991, Gorbachev and leaders of several other Soviet republics were to meet in Moscow to sign a new union treaty that would have decentralized power from the Kremlin. To hardliners, this was an unacceptable step toward the dissolution of the USSR. On August 19, 1991, they placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer home in Crimea and sent troops and tanks into Moscow to secure power.

 I “watched” the coup from television in the US. The Gorbachev reforms enabled the presence of cable TV, telephone and other media as never before under Soviet power. I had spent a lot of time in the USSR in the late 1980s during perestroika. What heady times! Every week and every day brought a new development in Soviet society, economy and polity. Many intellectuals, even conservative intellectuals, at first embraced fully those reforms. They USSR had stagnated under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. The economy grew slowly, consumer goods were in short supply, and ideological controls over the cultural sphere led to a gray and colorless daily life.

Such leading scientists as Zhores Alferov embraced the Gorbachev reforms to reinvigorate science and education. I met with Alferov several times in Moscow and could feel his excitement over the future of the reforms. (Physicist Andrei Sakharov also embraced perestroika, but he pushed Gorbachev to go further, to embrace true democracy and willingly permit the rise of other political parties.)

But instead of a rejuvenated USSR, the economy went into free fall, and the hardliners determined to “save” the Soviet Union. Fortunately, their efforts failed. Reformers, including Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, railed the public in the streets and turned the army against the coup plotters who wavered and gave up.

The Soviet Union did break up at the end of 1991, but with it the scientific enterprise lost its financial support and esteemed status. Alferov reaffirmed his communist affiliation in the 1990s to save his beloved science from what he believed were misguided policies of the Russian government.

 

No Tech-fix for Justice

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, on the Arab Spring and whether social media promotes radical political change. 

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in  Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

 

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.

References:

Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?

Women of the Arab Spring

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, Oxford UP: 1991.  

 

 

Making an Impact

Thomson Reuters released its most recent Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and impact factor rankings in late June. Many of the journals from the MIT Press did well this year, with several of them seeing a notable increase in impact factor. The title to steal the show was the quarterly Global Environmental Politics (GEP). The journal’s impact factor jumped nearly a full point from 1.382 to 2.231 in 2010. The JCR ranks GEP ninth in environmental studies and fifth out of 139 journals in political science.

GEP was founded in 2000 and explores the relationship between global political forces and environmental change. The MIT Press has watched this nascent journal grow its subscriber base continuously over the years and come to be a cornerstone for the burgeoning field of environmental science. It has quickly distinguished itself as an important home for seminal work and its influence both within and outside of academia has grown. Its authors hail from a variety of disciplines: political science, international relations, sociology, history, human geography, public policy, science and technology studies, environmental ethics, law economics, and environmental science. GEP editors, Jennifer Clapp and Matthew Paterson, attribute much of the success of the journal to this interdisciplinary authorship, stating that the “strong community of top-rate scholars both follow and contribute to the growing global conversation” on international environmental issues. Rather than simply gleaning select pieces from the field, Clapp and Paterson, along with GEP’s associate editors, consistently provide thorough and thoughtful feedback to authors, a process they believe creates high-quality articles that are both conceptually profound and topically relevant.

As scholars delve further into the complexities of environmental issues, it becomes clear that these stresses touch aspects of our lives previously unacknowledged. Say Clapp and Paterson, "the journal's success reflects the increasing recognition that environmental problems cannot be understood just as economic or technical questions, but raise profound questions about politics - of authority, power, justice". The MIT Press looks forward to watching GEP gather more questions, research and reflections within its pages, and we hope readers (both casual and professional) continue to find the substantive discourse they’ve come to expect from the journal.  

 

Bastille Day Reading

Happy Bastille Day! Here’s an excerpt from The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Michel Feher, to celebrate.

 

Libertinism, as developed in this reader, refers first and foremost to the licentious ways of the declining French aristocracy. However, before the eighteenth century, the word “libertine” did not refer exclusively to sexual mores. The term appeared as early as the middle of the sixteenth century within a theological context: Calvin used it to denounce a sect of dissident Anabaptists whom he accused of abusing their freedom by “transforming Scripture into allegory.” Others used it more generally as a synonym for “atheist.” By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the words “libertine” and “libertinism” became associated with an actual school of thought. The “scholarly libertines” (les libertines érudits), an assortment of scholars, poets, and dilettantes, formed a small group of freethinkers who shared an aversion to dogma; seeking to demystify superstition and to dismantle baseless beliefs and preconceived ideas, they contested both political and religious authority. Every watchword imposed by the powers that be, or accepted without question by the public, inevitably raised the libertines’ hackles. Conversely, any thinker persecuted for his opinions was counted, by definition, as a member of their circle…

After 1715, libertinism pertained almost exclusively to erotic matters…Neither moralistic nor strictly amoral, libertine fiction is nevertheless primarily about morals. Its main purpose is to examine critically the ethos of the petits-maîtres and of the dangerous men, as well as of the women who are the targets of the libertines’ maneuvers. In this respect, the writers in question paid special attention to their characters’ views on love, desire, and pleasure; first, because the libertines they describe spend most of their time devising and executing campaigns of seduction, and second, because they use their philosophical positions on love, nature, and society as a justification for their reckless ways.

Although libertine fiction is largely devoted to describing the schemes and the prowess of the petits-maîtres and the dangerous men, it also endeavors to underline the problems, the impasses, and even the tragedies to which the libertine life can lead.

 

Uncle Sam's Reading List

To get into the Independence Day 2011 spirit, we picked 11 books with “America” or “American” in the title to kick off the holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!

  Inventing American History by William Hogeland

American public history—in magazines and books, television documentaries, and museums—tends to celebrate its subject at all costs, even to the point of denial and distortion. This does us a great disservice, argues William Hogeland.  Looking at details glossed over in three examples of public history—the Alexander Hamilton revival, tributes to Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley, and the Constitution Center in Philadelphia—Hogeland considers what we lose when history is written to conform to political aims.

Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil

America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail. He finds profound differences.

 

After America’s Midlife Crisis by Michael Gecan

Gecan reveals an urban landscape in which careerism, nepotism, and greed are the principal movers in policy, while the institutions that preserve and advance communities—schools, churches, affordable housing, recreational opportunities—have fallen prey to the indifference of pols and developers and the shortsightedness of technocrats and shows how local experiments can create vibrant institutions that truly serve their constituents.

 

America's Food : What You Don't Know About What You Eat by Harvey Blatt

We don't think much about how food gets to our tables, or what had to happen to fill our supermarket's produce section with perfectly round red tomatoes and its meat counter with slabs of beautifully marbled steak. We don't realize that the meat in one fast-food hamburger may come from many different cattle raised in several different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In America's Food, Harvey Blatt gives us the specifics.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea

The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth.

 

America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina.  Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated.

 

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

The surge of inequality in income and wealth in the United States over the past twenty-five years has reversed the steady progress toward greater equality that had been underway throughout most of the twentieth century. This economic development has defied historical patterns and surprised many economists, producing vigorous debate. Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? examines the ways in which human capital policies can address this important problem.

 

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings by David E. Nye

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.

 

Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology by Kenneth A. Breisch

One natural outcome of the educational reform movement of the 1840s was the growth of the American public library. Some 450 public libraries were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The most important and influential architect of the era who built libraries was Henry Hobson Richardson, perhaps best known for his design of Boston's Trinity Church.

 

What Does the World Want from America?: International Perspectives on US Foreign Policy edited by Alexander T. J. Lennon

In What Does the World Want from America?, writers from twelve countries or regions (Brazil, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa) answer the question, "In an ideal world, what role would you want the United States to perform with your country and region?" Four analysts from the United States then respond.

 

The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 by Margret Kentgens-Craig

Although the Bauhaus existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula. After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. 

 

Cosmopolitanism vs. Environmentalism vs. Feminism vs....

In this excerpt from his book Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates, Peter Wenz helps us determine our own political identity--and gives us conversation fodder for our July 4th BBQs.

These twelve political philosophies can help most people identify and critically assess their own political leanings and priorities. You can get an inkling of your own political identity by looking at the main values featured in each philosophy:

• Theocracy—the state should promote the values of a particular religion.
• Natural law—state laws should reflect what is natural for human beings and consistent with the proper role of humanity on Earth.
• Libertarianism—the state should limit itself to fostering maximum individual liberty while protecting human life and property rights.
• Utilitarianism—the state should promote the greatest happiness or preference satisfaction in society.
• Free-market conservatism—the state should foster maximum economic growth.
• Contractarianism—the state should protect individual liberty and promote economic growth while maximizing benefits to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.
• Social conservatism—the state should preserve and protect social, political, and religious traditions that have served well in the past.
• Feminism—the state should ensure that no person is disadvantaged for being female.
• Multiculturalism—the state should recognize that no one culture holds all the keys to human flourishing and should therefore tolerate or promote cultural diversity.
• Environmentalism—the state should protect people and other species from unnecessary environmental degradation.
• Communitarianism—the state should foster bonds of community over tendencies to excessive individualism.
• Cosmopolitanism—the state should support certain universal values and norms.

Few people, if any, are moved by the values central to all twelve philosophies. Some people don’t care at all if our country contains the cultural diversity that multiculturalists favor. Many individualists have no sympathy with communitarian critiques of individualism and individual rights. Some thinkers, convinced that we can improve on conditions of ages gone by, have no interest in the traditions that social conservatives want to preserve. Those who believe that the international world is so dangerous that good nations must combat evil terrorists “no holds barred” reject cosmopolitanism’s universal norms of humane treatment (for terrorists). One way of locating yourself on the political landscape is to identify the values you reject.

 Another way is to identify the trade-offs that you find reasonable. Almost all of us experience political ambivalence from time to time, because we respect and want to promote a plurality of values in circumstances where trade-offs are required. For example, just about everyone wants the country to be secure from attack. But most people also respect the principles, championed most forcefully by libertarians, of individual privacy and freedom from government control. Security and liberty are in tension in this context, because the greater the scope for privacy and freedom, the greater the chance for a terrorist to evade detection and attack our country. Where security and liberty are concerned, we must often trade some of one to get more of the other. Our political identities are revealed to ourselves and others largely by the trade-offs that we find acceptable.

 

In-house Beach Reads

We asked MIT Press staff to share which MIT Press books they’d bring to the beach. Here are their picks:

Anar, Acquistions

 Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds by John Bevis. It’s short and sweet.

 

 

 

 

 

John, Marketing

The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s by Malcolm Turvey. A solidly written book on early European avant-garde (surrealist and other) films that explains their influence on the time and future, paving the way for and explaining modernization at the same time. As you would retreat into a movie on your DVD player in the dead of winter, it is nice to retreat into a book about movies at the height of summer.

Katie, Marketing

Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows by Samuel Jay Keyser. It is hilarious! A fantastic read despite whether you care about MIT or higher ed or not. Couldn’t put it down….

 

 

John, MIT Press Bookstore, also suggests Mens et Mania

I just read Jay Keyser’s Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows on the beach in Miami. It was a great beach read, although I think my outbursts of laughter may have disturbed the snoozing sunbathers nearby.

Emily, Acquisitions

Boston Review books won’t add much bulk to your beach bag and you can finish one in the time it takes to get a good tan!

 

 

 

Rebecca, Administration

If the beach were on Lake Victoria, I’d take Darwin’s Dreampond: Drama in Lake Victoria by  Tijs Goldschmidt! Great combo of education and good storytelling.

Democracy Now! Interview with Iranian Dissident Journalist Akbar Ganji

Iran’s preeminent political dissident, investigative journalist Akbar Ganji was in front of the United Nations on Thursday, leading a 3-day hunger strike to demand the release of all prisoners of conscience in Iran. In 2001, Ganji was imprisoned for six years for writing about the murders of dissident intellectuals and was finally released after an 80 day hunger strike. Leili Kashani interviewed Akbar Ganji for Democracy Now! about the demands of the strike as he stood in front of banner with a list of the names of known political detainees in Iran. (Translated by Faramarz Farbod).