Disintermediation and Politics

code_rage writes "Everett Ehrlich (capsule biography) writes an article in the Washington Post that examines Howard Dean's effective use of the internet to create a political organization. He says that Dean has created a 'virtual' party that has taken over the only remaining asset of value, the brand name of the Democratic party. His analysis refers to the theory of Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase: that the size of an organization is determined by the cost of gathering information. Ehrlich's article makes some predictions about the effect that Dean's strategy will have on the political system." In a related story, there's an mp3 interview with Dick Morris, along with a couple of (appropriately) blog posts about it.

Comments

Re:Lots of small donors

[sheldon]

"Actually the Democrats have more money from large organizations such as unions and PACs than any other party. Truth be known the Republicans have more small donations."

No, it's not at all true, and I have facts to back up my argument...
http://www.opensecrets.org/presidenti al/donordems. asp

The impact of unions and PACs has been negated by the McCain-Feingold prohibition against soft money donations to candidates and parties.

Re:Now, if Dean would just

[admiralh]

The main question is, how do we know Bush hadn't gotten a warning when the administration redacts 28 (or so) pages from relevant documents and only allows certain selected members of the 9/11 commission access to the information. I, like Dean, am saying that I don't believe Bush knew, but secrecy begets conspiracy theories, and this administration is easily the most secretive since Nixon. The Nixon conspiracy theories turned out to be true (Watergate, anybody?).

Quoting the link (a Robert Novak column)

In his Dec. 1 interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show," Dean was asked about allegations that President Bush is suppressing information that he was warned about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "The most interesting theory that I have heard so far . . . ," Dean responded, "is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis." This received scant media attention (except for Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer), but Democratic politicians shuddered.

Dean was given a chance to back off six days later by Chris Wallace, debuting as "Fox News Sunday's" moderator. "I don't believe that," the candidate said, then added: "But we don't know, and it'd be a nice thing to know." He concluded: "Because the president won't give information to the Kean Commission, we really don't know what the explanation is." After playing to Bush-haters who listen to National Public Radio, Dean repeated the same canard to Fox's Sunday morning mainstream viewers.

The other interesting thing here is to consider the source. Novak was the journalist who outed CIA agent Valerie Plame. Also, notice how it's the "Bush-haters" who listen to NPR, but "mainstream viewers" who watch Fox News's Sunday morning news.

Krauthammer also misrepresented Dean's interview on Hardball when Chris Matthews asked Dean if Deam would break up Fox. Everybody, including Dean started laughing, and Dean jokingly answered "On an ideological basis, yes." Anybody who was watching the show knew he was joking, plus the transcripts indicated [LAUGHTER]. But Krauthammer used the famous ellipsis (...) to eliminate the [LAUGHTER], and then criticized Dean for being "unhinged", which seems to be the current right-wing meme that is going around.

Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.

Interesting but doesn't wash

[cheezit]

So an economist's theory from seventy years ago explains the inevitability of American two-party politics, and the upcoming decline of those politics. Sounds good, but...

What about other countries? America is virtually alone in having only two viable political parties. Most of the rest of the world's democracies have more, and some have embraced a much more dynamic multi-party coalition form of government. Was their "cost of information" a lot lower?

I think the author's analysis discounts many other factors. American politics is affected by American's much weaker community affiliation, propensity for movement, high economic mobility, etc. Under these conditions the cost of information may be important.

In countries where (for instance) tribal or religious ties are strong, you could lower the cost of information/political organizing all you want and have no significant effect.

Then again maybe I should be over on k5 with this...:)

Re:Interesting but doesn't wash

[16K Ram Pack]

The reason why many countries have more parties/more variety is because they use systems like single transferrable vote or proportional representation.

Here in the UK, you end up with huge amounts of tactical voting. People might like Labour, but prefer the Liberal Democrats, and dislike the Conservatives, but if they perceive that the seat is Conservative vs Labour with LDs trailing, they will not choose who they want, but who will defeat who they don't want.

Then, there's the issue of "safe seats". If you live in somewhere like Henley or Huntingdon, and you don't support the Conservatives, is it worth voting? Your vote doesn't count for shit because they have such huge majorities in those seats.

Also, it creates a huge disparity. No-one chases the votes of people in Henley. They are more interested in the votes of people in Worcester. Opens up huge potential for jerrymandering.

Re:Nah.

[admiralh]

No runoff in the US. If a state chooses to have a runoff to choose it's electors, then fine, but most are simply plurality-take-all. If no candidate gets a majority of electors, the 12th amendment (ratified after the disputed election of 1800) sends the election into the House of Representatives, where, IIRC, they get to choose from the top three votegetters for president and the top two for VP. This has happened once since 1800, in 1824 (John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford were the three, though Henry Clay also got electoral votes). JQA won when Clay threw his support to Adams in the so-called "corrupt bargain" which led to Adams being a one-term president (Jaskson won in 1828).

So that's taken care of.

Re:Lots of small donors

[twiddlingbits]

A December 18, 2002 Washington Times editorial reports that donors giving "small and medium amounts" in 2002 overwhelmingly supported the GOP, while "rich or deep-pocketed givers" hugely backed the Democrats! Those giving $200 to $999: GOP $68 million; Democrats $44 million. Those giving $1,000 to $9,999: GOP $317 million; Democrats $307 million. The "fabulously wealthy" donors of $10,000+ gave $111 million to the GOP - a whopping $29 million less than the $140 million they lavished on the Democrats! Among those who gave $100,000+, the Democrats raised $72 million - more than double the $34 million the GOP took. The fact is that in the 2002 election cycle, those who gave a million dollars or more poured $36 million into the Democrat coffers, and a paltry $3 million into the pockets of the GOP. Again: millionaire donations went Democrat by a 12:1 margin! The two parties took in about the same amount overall - GOP: $384 million; Democrats: $350 million. Just look at the Hollywood left, and you see where the big money goes. In addition, the GOP attracted 40% more individual donors! (George W. Bush set an all-time fund-raising record by collecting the most money from one-thousand-dollar donors in the history of presidential politics.) Far more people giving small amounts exist as contributors to the Republican Party - while Democrats skunked the GOP among the super-rich. That's no surprise, since nine of the twelve richest members of the United States Senate are Democrats.

Re:Dean is Bush's best hope

[mathdog2000]

"Dean is far-left" is a standard right-wing straw man. Dean is not *even* left. Check out Political Compass's analysis of 2004 Pres. Candidates for a little perspective.

Coase amnd Open Source

[user555]

Coase's analysis is still very relevant today.

There's a great paper applying Coase's framework to explain the sucess of Open Source software.

It's available here.

Anyone who wants to understand why open source works should read it.

South Park Republicans?

[cpeterso]

An interesting interpretation is that many non-religious-right GOP members are "South Park Republicans". I would call them Libertarians who don't know it. Maybe the Libertarian Party should buy some commercial airtime on Comedy Central during "South Park" and "Tough Crowd"? :-)

"South Park Republicans" :

If Republicans are so different from mainstream America, then who voted for them? The nation has more Republican congressmen and state governors than any other political party, plus control of the White House.

The answer could very well be the "South Park Republicans." The name stems from the primetime cartoon "South Park" that clearly demonstrates the contrast within the party. The show is widely condemned by some moralists, including members of the Christian right. Yet in spite of its coarse language and base humor, the show persuasively communicates the Republican position on many issues, including hate crime legislation ("a savage hypocrisy"), radical environmentalism, and rampant litigation by ambitious trial lawyers. In one episode, industrious gnomes pick apart myopic anti-corporate rhetoric and teach the main characters about the benefits of capitalism.