Matt Yglesias

In Defense of Norman Angell

I was pretty surprised to see Daniel Drezner list Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion as one of the ten worst international relations books ever, and even more surprised when it became clear that Drezner knows perfectly well what the book says:

This book has been widely misinterpreted, so let’s be clear about what Angell got right and got wrong. He argued that the benefits from international trade vastly exceeded the economic benefits of empire, and therefore the economic motive for empire no longer existed. He was mostly right about that. He then argued that an enlightened citizenry would glom onto this fact and render war obsolete. Writing this in 1908, he was historically, spectacularly wrong.

Let’s think this through. In pre-WWI intellectual circles you had Angell arguing that imperial competition and war would be self-destructive and therefore war wouldn’t happen. He was right about the analysis but mistaken about the prediction. But at the time, other main schools of thought included a nationalist approach which held that imperial competition and war would be awesome and therefore war should be welcomed and a Leninist approach which held that imperial competition and war were inevitable under capitalism and therefore Soviet-style revolution and Communism would be a good answer.

Put alongside the architects of the disasters of 1914-45, I think Angell comes out looking pretty good. Was there an important mistake in his analysis? Yes. But to this day, one can learn a lot of important things from Angell’s argument, and unlike the other ideas in the air at the time Angell’s didn’t cause any catastrophes. His book is an important one, and certainly not one of the ten worst ever.

Federal Reserve Independence and Democracy

I can imagine arguments against institutional independence for central banks, but I think the whole idea that Fed independence is “undemocratic” in a problematic way is, itself, pretty problematic. After all, Ben Bernanke’s not a dictator. He was appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate, just like a lot of other officials. It’s true that the president can’t just fire him unilaterally. But it’s not clear that George W. Bush’s ability to fire US Attorneys for failing to pervert the criminal justice system for partisan ends served the cause of democracy. Nor do I think it makes much sense to say that the United States is undemocratic for requiring the president to listen to the military advice of professional officers rather than political appointees.

Meanwhile, we have lots of countermajoritarian political institutions in the United States, ranging from the apportionment of the Senate to the filibuster to the workings of the committee system to the electoral college to bicameralism in our legislatures. But we’re still “a democracy” just like Canada and France and India and Japan are all democracies despite having very different political institutions. And given the rest of the political institutions in the United States, it’s not clear what alternative to independence would be more democratic.

We could just let the President set interest rates and conduct monetary policy, but that would be making Fed functions less responsive to congress than the current setup is. Or we could say that monetary policy actions require an act of congress. But congress is countermajoritarian itself and has an enormous status quo bias. Maybe we could have the Fed chair stand for election independently? But to make a long story short, I don’t really see a huge problem here in terms of democracy once you put the Fed in the context of the rest of the American institutional framework.

Crisis and the American Way

Noam Scheiber says “our political system isn’t ideally suited to dealing with financial and economic crises.” Ezra Klein disagrees and says we deal fine with crises, the problem “is long-term crises like global warming or health costs.”

I think this misunderstands the force of the point. No political system deals well with problems where short-term pain can provide long-term gain, or where concentrated benefits are set against diffuse costs. But the U.S. political system, with its high number of veto points, is arguably unsuited to taking decisive action in response to a crisis compared to alternative models, such as the Westminster system in play in the United Kingdom and Canada or to the multiparty coalition systems of northern Europe. It’s hard to know how to evaluate that claim. There is, however, a political science literature indicating that American-style systems are more prone to total constitutional breakdown in a crisis.

Certainly the American system doesn’t appear to have been designed with an aim to facilitating a decisive response in a crisis situation. Instead, it does two things very well. One—one of its primary purposes—is to protect private property within the confined of a system of representative government. Compared to other advanced democracies, the United States has lower taxes, a smaller welfare state, less regulation, etc., and this is not an accident. The other major virtue of our system is that it knits a very diverse country together into two broad, loose coalitions. If we had an Israeli (or Dutch or Swiss or…) coalition-based system, then we might have an incredible spectrum of regional or ethnic parties as new immigrant groups formed new identity-based parties rather than joining establishment “machines.”

Carbon Giveaways Hammer the Poor, Auction & Rebate Gets Fair Environmental Sustainability

Lurking in the background of the cap & trade debate is a quasi-technical issue. Capping the amount of allowable carbon dioxide emissions creates a new source of wealth in the economy—permission to emit carbon dioxide. This, in turn, raises a question about how to allocate that resource. One suggestion, popular with industry and its tame dogs in congress, is to allocate it to industry. Give the permits away, and let companies either use them themselves or sell them to others. Another suggestion, more popular with environmentalists and economists, is to auction the permits and then use the funds thereby raised to accomplish something useful. David Roberts observes that recent Congressional Budget Office testimony has produced some important analysis of this issue that’s conveniently summarized in the following mostly-legible graphic:

On the top you see the distributional impact of three different policy options. On the bottom, you see the macroeconomic impact. The middle option is to auction the permits and use the funds to cut corporate taxes, this is something I’ve never heard anyone propose but maybe Doug Elmendorf thinks it’s a good idea because it scores well on the macro measure, albeit with catastrophic distributional consequences. The options on the left and on the right, by contrast, are options that are under consideration. They have the same macroeconomic impact, and presumably the same ecological impact. But the cap-and-rebate proposal results in gains for the bottom 40 percent of households, a tiny loss for the median quintile, and small losses for the top 40 percent. The cap-and-giveaway proposal results in large losses for the bottom 80 percent of the population and a large gain for the top 20 percent.

Naturally “moderate” Democrats such as Jeff Bingaman prefer the cap-and-giveaway out of what they deem pragmatism, but what looks a lot like fanatical devotion to the interests of the well-off to the exclusion of other concerns. Larry Bartels has done research that seems to indicate that members of the Senate are responsive to the views of their middle-class constituents, very responsive to the views of their well-off constituents, and not-at-all responsive to the views of their poor constituents. So if a cap-and-trade bill does pass, I assume it’ll take a cap-and-giveaway form, and you can bet that opponents of auctions will specifically cite the interests of the economically struggling as their main motive for screwing the economically struggling over.

Rich/Poor Voting Gaps Around the World

Andrew Gelman has read your comments to my post on his chart of rich/poor voting gaps in different countries and done a post further explicating the chart and trying to answer various concerns.

Voting and Income in the U.S. and Europe

I wrote over here that “[i]n the US and in Europe, income level is fairly predictive of voting behavior.” That’s broadly true, but as Andrew Gelman pointed out to me in an email, it obscures some major differences. His book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State includes this graph summarizing international differences in the extent to which high income leads to conservative voting:

I think it’s probably better not to think too much about the Eastern Europe and Latin America cases here and limit our attention to the rich countries. As you can see, it’s generally true that in Western Europe, as in the United States, being rich seems to make you favorable to parties of the right. But there are some exceptions to this rule. And in general, the rich-poor gap is not as sharp as in the US. This is intertwined with the fact that the economic gap between rich and poor is not as large and the fact that the ideological gap between the parties is not as big. In some of these countries, though, I would be interested to know how the parties are being coded. Based on my understanding of the Swiss party system, for example, I’m not sure which party I would label as the “conservative” one—they basically seem to have one left-wing party and then three different flavors of conservative parties.

Political Science and Political Journalism

Via Henry Farrell, Matt Bai comments briefly on political journalists’ view of political scientists:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

I think this kind of attitude is not universally shared, and generally leads to bad political journalism. I think it’s obvious to anyone who thinks about it that the features of journalism—original reporting, first-hand conversations, speed, granularity—allow it to push the frontiers of our understanding beyond what rigorous political science could possible do. At the same time, it’s just incredibly foolish to go about doing the work of journalism about politics devoid of any broader theoretical or empirical foundations provided by political science.

The events of the day play out against a larger structural backdrop. And it’s just not possible to try to understand them a-theoretically. What journalists unschooled in political science tend to do is to substitute prejudice for understanding. So you notice that in Maryland and Virginia there are a lot of well-to-do Democrats and start writing stories which presuppose that poor people are generally Republicans and rich people are generally Democrats. An alternative approach would be to read Andrew Gelman’s book and you’d see that this is an idiosyncratic feature of a small portion of the country and that, overall, high income is a strong predictor of Republican voting.

Reading Gelman’s book isn’t a substitute for interviewing people or trying to understand campaign strategies. But it provides you with an accurate understanding of the larger context in which to situate those interviews. If you don’t read it, you won’t understand your reporting properly.

Busting More Gerrymandering Myths

Andrew Gelman says that not only is gerrymandering not the cause of partisan polarization, it doesn’t even really make seats safer:

I can’t disagree with Cohen’s first sentence above, but I part company with him after that. When Gary and I looked at the data, we found that redistricting (“gerrymandering”) was not associated with a decline in competitiveness of elections in Congress or state legislatures. Legislative elections have been gradually becoming less competitive, but they are typically more competitive after redistricting.

I’m glad to learn of this empirical result, because I never really understood the theoretical basis of the gerrymander/uncompetitiveness link. Any constituency, no matter how you draw it, is going to have a median voter to whom one can appeal. The shape of the district ought to alter what kind of candidates are viable, but never make it impossible to field viable candidates. I would say that the biggest impediment to competitive elections is fundraising issues. If you had a public financing system that guaranteed a fully funded campaign to the major party nominees in every district, a lot of “safe” seats would suddenly start looking less safe, since it would make sense for both parties to do their best to find candidates well-suited to every district. And that, of course, is why we’re unlikely to see public financing of congressional campaigns.

The Time for Bipartisanship

Looking back on the stimulus votes a lot of people are, rightly, drawing some conclusions about the prospects more broadly for efforts to pursue bipartisan or “post-partisan” initiatives. For my two cents, I think the main point is that you need to think seriously about what kind of issue you’re talking about. What bipartisanship requires, at the end of the day, is not politeness but a willingness to identify issues that cut across normal divides. For example, George W. Bush seems to be a stupid man, who’s also kind of a cruel jerk, along with being such a hard-core partisan that he routinely corrupted a number of federal agencies, including the U.S. Attorneys’ offices, in an effort to abuse his power for partisan gains. But none of that stopped him from having a nice bipartisan signing ceremony for the legislation authorizing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief:

The crux of the matter wasn’t that Bush had some momentary conversion to a skilled bipartisan approach. Rather, funding for initiatives aimed at fighting infectious disease in Africa is just a bit peripheral to the core issues of American politics. So bipartisanship was possible.

The high tide of bipartisanship in the United States came when many northern Democrats started seeing an embrace of civil rights for African-Americans as a logical extension of economic and social egalitarianism in the Jefferson-Jackson mold. At this same time, all Southern politicians were committed to a white supremacist social framework and to the view that terrorist violence aimed at bolstering that framework should go unpunished by legal authorities. That meant that you had a wide range of views about non-racial issues inside the Democratic Party, because Southern politicians of all perspectives were Democrats, and you also had a wide range of views about racial issues inside the Democratic Party, because the Southerners were white supremacists but the northerners generally weren’t. This meant there were ideological coalitions that cut across the partisan divide on all kinds of issues, with some Democrats joining with most Republicans to take a conservative view of economic issues, and some Democrats joining with most Republicans to take a progressive view of racial issues. And you also had questions of pure partisan interest (relating to the winning of elections and disbursement of patronage) that cut across the ideological coalitions.

The modern political system just isn’t like that. Racial issues have been subsumed into the larger economic debate, and the parties are well-sorted by ideology. That doesn’t mean you can never see bipartisan coalitions, but it means you can’t see them on the core political issues about taxes, spending, and the distribution of resources. You can’t find them, in other words, on things like the stimulus bill. But they’d be easy to find both on things like PEPFAR that are fairly minor, and also perhaps on issues that have a strong regional component. What a commitment to running a bipartisan administration would have to mean, if not to be vacuous, would be a determination to use the president’s agenda-setting powers to focus legislative activity on those sort of questions. But with the country in the midst of an economic crisis, a health care crisis, and a climate crisis it would seem very odd to me to decide to do that.

Elections Getting Duller

Election commentary had a tendency to get into some very fine-grained state-by-state analysis about what does and doesn’t appeal to voters in Pennsylvania or Colorado or the I-4 corridor in Florida and so forth. The evidence, however, was of a pretty boring more-or-less uniform national swing:

My inclination had been to say that press over-emphasis of state-specific factors was probably a holdover from the unusually close 2000 election when the details of the electoral college turned out to really matter. But Andrew Gelman took a more systematic look at the issue and finds that the uniformity of presidential election swings has been experiencing a steady (especially if you include the one-off case of the southern swing to Carter in 1976), decades-long increase:

Plausibly, then, the anticipation of state swings being substantially independent of one another simply reflects the actual experience of veteran campaign operatives and campaign reporters. The swings actually were less uniform in the past. And conventional wisdom among the younger generation of journalists and operatives is still dominated by the lessons taught by their elders rather than by the recent spate of low-variation elections.

Partisan Self-Deception

Ezra Klein reminds me that this finding from Larry Bartels’ paper on the rationalizing voter is relevant to my talk of the ideological valence of economic optimism:

This plots voters’ view of the economy in 1996. That there’s some divergence shouldn’t be surprising. But the level of divergence increases as you start talking about better-informed voters. The more access to information you have, it seems, the more you can do to find information that will confirm your views.

By Request: Filibusters

Jason asks:

Are there really any strong reasons for the 111th Senate to adopt Rule 22 (60 votes for cloture)?

I don’t really want to do an analysis of the short-term of the short term politics, spin, and ethics surrounding this issue beyond noting that back during the “nuclear option” fight I took an anti-filibuster line. Instead, I think it’s more useful to think in broader and more abstract terms.

The book that’s been most influential on my thinking in this regard is George Tsebelis’ Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. One of the points he makes (no idea how original this is to him) is that one of the best ways to characterize different types of political regimes is in terms of how many veto points exist at which legislation can be blocked.

In a Westminster regime such as they have in the UK or Canada, there’s just one. The cabinet formulates a proposal, and then it needs to be voted on in parliament. And thanks to tight party discipline, things are basically never blocked. One variant on that is a system, such as they have in Israel or the Netherlands, that combines a unicameral parliament with cabinets that are invariably formed by coalitions. In a system like that, the threat of a parliamentary veto is more real and you can see government crises and collapses. In some countries, there’s an elected president who can veto legislative actions, which adds another veto point. And in some countries there’s a second legislative house whose concurrence is necessary to pass legislation.

The United States has all three of those things. It also has a system in which a bill generally needs majority support on relevant committees and subcommittees in order to pass. All told, that’s a lot of veto points compared to what you see in most democracies.

So that’s the context in which to ask whether or not it makes sense to have a supermajority requirement for many Senate votes. I would say “no.” Even absent the filibuster, our system would still feature an unusually large number of veto points, especially when you take our unusually robust system of judicial review into account. The supermajority requirement is at odds with our basic democratic norms, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with an example of it ever actually being used to protect the interests of some kind of put-upon minority, and I see no empirical reason to think that our systematically larger number of veto points is producing systematically better results than you see elsewhere. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that the large number of veto points makes it easier for narrow interest groups to block public interest reforms.

The Ambiguous Legacy

Ed Kilgore has a really interesting post on Southern political history that gets into the winding and complicated manner in which racial politics has interacted with other issues in Dixie:

But there any “seamless web of reaction” theory about the South begins to break down. The two decades after the Compromise were characterized by savage political warfare across the region between supporters and opponents of capitalist development and corporate subsidies. And no one embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy myth more than the southern Populists, who viewed antebellum southern “civilization,” accurately, as anti-capitalist. The great southern Populist Tom Watson of Georgia, who once called himself a “red socialist through and through,” and who did actual jail time in opposing U.S. entry into the “imperialist” World War I, was a disciple of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and an unequalled romaniticizer of the Lost Cause.

This period also illustrated the highly ambiguous nature of the race issue in the South. The Populists initially appealed to African-American voters, but eventually championed disenfranchisement of blacks as the only way to build a class-based political movement among whites. And while hardly any notable white political figure in the South in this era was anything less than a thoroughgoing racist, the “New South” apostles, and the “Bourbon Democrats” who succeeded them and characterized one element of the Southern Democracy right on up to the Civil Rights Movement, often postured as paternalistic defenders of African-Americans against the violence of redneck populists.

One thing I might add is that perhaps the defining picture of contemporary southern politics is that this sort of thing has ceased to be the case. Overall, the region is clearly — like the rest of the country — much more progress on racial matters than it was during Watson’s time. But unlike in the past, basic left-right economic issue disputes are now very closely aligned with people’s attitudes toward racial questions. In general, over time American politics as a whole has shifted from a two-dimensional conflict to one-dimensional conflict and this has had particularly acute consequences in southern states where racial polarization in attitudes is higher-than-average and where you often see an unusually large black population. But this world is actually a consequence of the Civil Rights era that replaced an earlier, more complicated dynamic.

The Administration’s Ideology

Via Henry Farrell, Nolan McCarty takes a rigorous look at the ideology of the Obama administration:

To gauge the differences between the administration and Congressional democrats, I use Keith Poole’s “common space” measurement of conservatism. This measure is an adjustment of DW-NOMINATE scores designed to facilitate comparison of the House and Senate. Each legislator is given a single conservatism score for her entire career ranging from around -1 (very liberal) to 1 (very conservative). One drawback is that these scores are only available up through the 109th Congress (2005-2006). So I can only compare the cabinet to the Democratic caucuses of that term. Another is that Bill Richardson’s score more than a decade old (but the rest continued to serve through the 110th Congress).

The following table list the conservatism scores for the administration as well as the House and Senate leaders and the medians of the caucuses.

The evidence is pretty strong that the administration lies considerably to the right of the Democrats in the House, but is reasonably representative of Senate Democrats. But only Solis comes from the most liberal wing of the party. The center of the party is well represented in powerful positions by the president, vice-president, secretary of state, and WH chief of staff while the lower cabinet is filled with more moderate Democrats and a Republican.

Needless to say, the median senator is more conservative than the median senate Democrat. And many bills can only be passed with the support of ten senators who are more conservative than the median senator. So as I was saying yesterday even if the Obama administration were to shift its position more in the direction of Nancy Pelosi, I doubt that would change many legislative outcomes. The bulk of the Obama administration is more conservative than I am, but less conservative than the pivotal members of congress.

Political Science at War

Condoleezza Rice is now offering the strange claim that her status as a political scientist bolsters her feeling that invading Iraq was a good idea:

And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

My colleague Ryan Powers reminds us that, in fact, many of the leading lights of the international relations subfield of political science tried to warn the country against the invasion of Iraq. There was also this interesting article that surveyed opinion among IR scholars in Foreign Policy magazine several years ago:

The American public has only recently soured on the war in Iraq, but the great majority of international relations scholars have always
opposed it. A comparison of scholarly opinion with U.S. public opinion (as reported by a Pew poll in August 2004) reveals huge gaps between the professors and the people. Nearly 80 percent of scholars opposed the U.S. decision to go to war. More than 87 percent of these scholars believe that the war in Iraq has harmed or will harm U.S. security. These numbers contrast dramatically with the beliefs of likely voters, where roughly half believed the war in Iraq was the “right choice.” left of center. But political orientation doesn’t explain everything. Conservative scholars supported the war in much lower proportions than conservative America.

One of the most annoying habits of the press and the DC conventional wisdom more generally has been a persistent habit of ignoring these facts in favor of the rhetoric of “seriousness” that casts war opponents as a much of ignorant hippies and foul-mouthed bloggers who, at best, were right about Iraq by accident or something. But the vast majority of credentialed experts in Middle East regional studies, and the vast majority of credentialed experts in international relations have always been extremely skeptical of the adventure in Iraq. The main supporters of the war have been politicians, magazine and newspaper pundits, and a smallish group of heavily politicized think tank-based experts and “experts” who, for whatever reason, are granted privileged access to the media over people in a better position to offer genuinely independent analysis. I think many political observers watching the debate unfold in 2002-2003 would have gotten the impression that most experts were more-or-less backing the president on Iraq. But while it’s certainly true that most op-ed columnist and most Brookings fellows were behind Bush, the broader group of political scientists who specialize in these issues has always taken the opposite view.

The Most Liberal Congress Ever

Nolan McCarty has come to my attention in recent years as a political scientist who does a lot of work that’s relevant to the field of political punditry — except he does it more accurately than a political scientist. As such, I’m a bit saddened to learn that he now has a blog since it used to be that those of us who’d read his book (with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal), Polarized America, had a competitive edge over the internet-only crowd.

At any rate, it promises to make interesting reading. Here’s a post examining the steady increase in the number of liberals, as measured by the DW-NOMINATE system, in the House of Representatives.

DW-NOMINATE scores, which are based on roll call voting records, run roughly from -1 to 1 where -1 is a very liberal score and 1 is a very conservative score. So to gauge how liberal a given House is, I simply compute the fraction of members with scores that fall beneath certain thresholds. The thresholds I chose were -.3, -.4, and -.5. To give the reader some context, Charlie Rangel and Nancy Pelosi score at approximately -.5, Rahm Emanuel clocked in just below -.4, and Dan Lipinski is just a little more liberal than -.3 (sorry that part of the ideological spectrum is devoid of household names).

The growth in the number of liberals reflects the fact that the Democratic Party has been growing stronger in recent cycles, but also the fact that the Democratic caucus that’s emerged since 1995 is a more liberal party than the old one which contained many conservative white southerners.

Republicans and Auto Bailouts

Sara Binder looks at patterns in House GOP support for the auto bailout package:

And which Republicans were most likely to support pumping emergency loans into the Big Three? Location, location, location. All of the eight Michigan Republicans who participated in the vote supported the bailout. Indeed, Republicans from Rustbelt states were disproportionately (though not surprisingly) more likely to vote with the auto manufacturers, even controlling for ideological predispositions. Republican moderates were also more likely to cross the double yellow line to vote with the Democrats, just as they were for the Wall Street bailout package in October. Granted, Republicans from Rustbelt states tend to be more moderate than their Republican colleagues. But both ideology and geography tend to matter in driving GOP support. Finally, even after controlling for policy views and constituency forces, retiring Republicans were more likely to vote with Motown. Single-minded seekers of re-election can quickly become single-minded seekers of saving their 401K’s.

What lesson should the Big Three draw from the House vote as they seek roughly a dozen GOP votes to break Senator Richard Shelby’s promised Senate filibuster? Fill your tanks and buckle up for a bumpy ride. The geographic concentration of the domestic auto industry in the Rustbelt radically limits the industry’s voting power in the Senate. Nor has the spread of foreign automakers in search of lower labor costs into the South helped the Big Three’s cause, as southern senators—already ideologically predisposed to shun direct government support for the auto industry—seem unswayed by the potential for a heavily-unionized domestic industry in the Midwest to go bankrupt. And unfortunate for the Big Three, few of the remaining Senate GOP moderates yet appear to be on board for the bailout package.

Not earth-shattering revelations — this is about what you’d expect. But it’s good to know for sure and not just be guessing.

The Counterintuition Boom

John Sides notes the skyrocketing occurrence of the phrase “counterintuitive findings” in political science literature:

The world sure is getting less interesting! And of course this does point to a potential problem with the scholarship — a “counterintuitive” finding is more interesting, and thus more likely to get published, than an intuitive one. But maybe lots of our intuitive ideas are correct and the “counterinuitive” selection bias is obscuring that. Certainly this is a problem in punditry and (especially) magazine writing, where the key to getting a lot of column inches is to have an interesting idea rather than a true one.

In Retrospect…

Nate Silver says it’s too soon to tell if we’ve just witnessed a “realigning” election:

Since the turn of the last century, there have been 11 cases in which the presidency changed parties: 1912 (Wilson), 1920 (Harding), 1932 (Roosevelt), 1952 (Eisenhower), 1960 (Kennedy), 1968 (Nixon), 1976 (Carter), 1980 (Reagan), 1992 (Clinton), 2000 (Bush), and 2008 (Obama). In 9 of the 11 cases, the party winning the presidency had also made substantial gains in the Congress as compared with four years’ earlier (although not necessarily as compared with two years’ earlier). The two exceptions were the last two party changes before Obama: Clinton in 1992, when the Democrats were pretty much treading water in the Congress, and Bush in 2000, when the Republicans were doing likewise.

What ultimately distinguishes the elections that are considered to have been realignments is the efficacy of the governance of the rising party, rather than the force with which said party took office. Ronald Reagan and FDR, famously, had coattails — but so did Warren G. Harding, who brought the Republicans a net gain of 123 (!) seats in the House in 1920.

I think the better way to put the point is simply to agree with David Mayhew that there isn’t really any such thing as a “realigning election.” Or, to put it in perhaps a more Rortian way, to say that questions about realignments aren’t useful questions to ask. If presidential election outcomes were completely random the odds would still overwhelmingly favor the emergence of Democratic and Republican “clusters” and you could choose to interpret the beginning election of some cluster as a “realigning” random outcome. But why would you want to?

Of course election outcomes aren’t random. But they’re determined largely by events and, needless to say, the events of 2010, 2012, 2016 and so forth haven’t happened yet. Whether big Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008 will be followed by consolidation of power or backlash depends entirely on what happens in the future and not at all on factors you can discern by peering into the election results.