Category Archives: Political Science

DC statehood and political self-interest: Where are the flag makers?

Back when I was in graduate school, my (dorky) friends and I had an impromptu contest: everyone had to create an urban legend based on their dissertation research, and whoever could spread it the farthest on the Internet in 1 month won. Since my thesis was about statehood politics, I came up with the following: a DC statehood bill passed the House in 1984, but stalled in the Senate because a Reconstruction-era Supreme Court ruling requires that all U.S. flags flown by the federal government or a state government be up-to-date, and thus DC statehood would have meant the tremendous cost of going back to the moon to update the 50-star flags we planted there. I always kinda liked that — it’s stupid enough to make you laugh, but just plausible enough to possibly make you think twice.

And while that’s just some throwaway humor, I have always thought the connection between statehood and the flag was somehow important, enough so that the original title of my dissertation — and the title I’ll probably use if it ever becomes a book — was Sewing New Stars. The U.S. flag almost perfectly reflects the dual-sovereignty of our federal system: the states are constituitive of the whole, but the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts;  and when we add a new semi-sovereign state to the union, the flag itself changes, a lingering physically manifestation of a fundamental political action within the federal union. And the post 1818-flag — in which the number of stripes is fixed at 13 — reflects a wonderful understanding of the union: new stars can be added to the union, but those new stars, rather than fundamentally altering the union, instead simply become part of it. The union itself, like the stripes, is perpetual and unchanging.

And yet that’s just so much romantic hogwash.

The more important connection between the flag and statehood —and I say this only three-quarters jokingly — is political, as in raw political power. As in currently-untapped raw political power. Let me explain.

One of the animating principles of democratic theory — whether your favorite political theorist is James Madison or Barry Weingast — is that human beings are self-interested, and that self-interest will motivate their political choices. Furthermore, the working assumption for at least the last few centuries is that the primary self-interest for most people will be economic. Which is to say, most people will make their political choices based primarily on the impact those choices will have on their accumulation of the scare material resources of society.

There are all sorts of well-known individual and collective consequences of this, ranging from the tendency of democracies to create inter-generational externalities (pushing pollution and debt costs onto our children) to the difficulty of forming interest lobbies for large groups seeking diffuse benefits (why spend the money to join the Sierra club when you can just free ride and get all the benefits?).

This is not to say that people will not, on occasion, be motivated by the common good (like reducing poverty) or by interests that are not primarily economic (like reducing abortions). But for most people most of the time, those interest will be secondary. Especially if they come into conflict with the economic self-interest. Which is simply to say that your views on the proper future of slavery circa 1857 might well have hinged on the amount of capital you held in slaves, or the degree to which your livelihood was dependent on the slave economy.

This, of course, can make for some interesting situations, in which economic self-interest puts people or groups in awkward moral situations. The most famous (and potentially disturbing) example is the role of munitions makers in the promotion of war. This has been a popular concern for centuries, and nary a major war occurs in which the weapons manufacturers aren’t accused of promoting and/or outright lobbying for conflict over diplomacy. A more humorous example is the often-told dark joke about segregation being propped-up politically by the deep pockets of the water-fountain manufacturers lobby. And if you happen to own the equipment needed to clean up an oil spill, well, yes. There does not seem to be an issue one can think of in which an economic interest for somebody can not be imagined.

Which brings us to the flags.  As you might suspect, I have a certain fascination with the modern statehood movements in Puerto Rico, DC, and other American territories. Most of these movements have almost zero chance of success. Besides the mixed merits of their substantive claims for statehood, many of the movements are chronically underfunded,. There’s little incentive for the average person — either in the territory or outside of it — to donate money to them, because of the lack of particularized benefits and thus the ability to free-ride. Similarly, the economic consequences of statehood (in the contemporary cases) do not obviously benefit any sectors of the economy in particular. So the incentives for industry are at best neutral in regard to statehood, or in some cases may theoretically be to work against it.  In other words, there doesn’t seem to be anyone to bankroll any of these individual movements.

But there is one potentially large, national interest group that seemingly has a huge stake in the success of any and all statehood movements: flag manufacturers!

Think about it: the average flag never needs to be replaced (not counting the little throw-away flags used at 4th of July or whatever). They basically last forever, or at least a solid 40 years. So the demand for flags is almost purely based on the need for flags in new locations, with very little demand based on life-cycle replacement of existing flags. But if a 51st state were to be admitted to the union, every flag in America would need to be replaced. Every classroom in America, every government building, all the military flags, every patch on every college basketball jersey, all the 4th of July sidewalk lining flags that reused every year. Hell, as described above, there are 50-star American flags on the moon. It’s endless!

Let’s do some very rough back-of-the-envelope math to figure out what kind of cheese is at stake here. Flags cost all different prices, but it looks like your basic nylon mid-size U.S. flag is something like $20. I have no idea what the profit margin is on a flag, but I don’t think $2-$5 is unreasonable. Let’s say $2.50 per flag. Now we just need to know the total number of U.S. flags to be replaced. Who the hell knows? It’s like one of those i-banking interview questions. Five hundred thousand? A million? 50 million? I literally have no idea. But we need a better answer than “a mind-boggling amount.”

So let’s just estimate a sub-question: how many flags would the public schools need? Let’s assume that there’s a flag in every classroom, as there was when I was growing up. A quick google search indicates that no one actually knows how many high schools there are in America, but various estimates seem to be around 20,000. Give each of them a radically conservative estimate of 15 classrooms. And give each high school one middle school and 3 elementary schools with a total of 35 more classrooms. By my math, that’s a million flags right there, in a conservative estimate.  Which tells me this might be a billion dollar issue. In an industry that (evidently) hasn’t had a boom year since, well, 1959.

And talk about a manufacturing-sector stimulus plan. Imagine what the DoD contract for all new flags is worth? The lobbying campaign almost writes itself. Expand American Freedom, Create American Jobs. Do your part: give the gift of America this year. Statehood: It’s not just a 19th century relic. It helps makes the U.S. economy strong.

Of course, the flagmakers shouldn’t be satisfied with just a 51st state. The best strategy for the flagmakers’ lobby would be to try to get a state admitted about once a year, preferably in the late Spring. Under the flag laws at 4 U.S.C. § 2 (yeah), regardless of how many states are admitted to the union in a given year, new stars are only put on the flag on July 4, meaning it’s worthless for the flagmakers to get two states in at once. And the closer the admission date is to the next July 4, the less chance of any competition sprouting up to manufacture flags during the windfall. If you already are in the business of flagmaking, and you could just get a surprise admission in mid-June each year, I’m pretty sure that’s a goldmine.

Perhaps next week, I’ll do a more serious post on DC statehood. But for now, let me say that my preference would probably be to repeal the 23rd amendment, shrink the federal seat of government down to the bare-bones area surrounding the Mall, the White House, and the Capitol, and retrocess the remainder of the district to Maryland.

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On the consequences of landslides

How will the 2010 midterm election affect the ideology of the House Democrats? Without speculating or considering how it might have changed the ideologies of individual returning members, it probably is safe to say it will have a moderately large aggregate effect simply via replacement. As many commentators have pointed out  (for example here and here), the Democratic losses in the election were skewed toward the more conservative wing of the party’s House membership. After the jump, I use some rough-cut empirical data to shed further light on this point. Continue reading

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Cold Fusion

This is an article about political fusion. But it won’t seem that way for several paragraphs.

From pretty much any perspective you want to look — drama, comedy, tragedy, intrigue, farce, oddity, chaos, what if, — it’s pretty hard, among political events,  to beat the 1860 Presidential election.

From a basic “what happened” standpoint, it’s easily the most unique election in American history. There were four candidates, representing three parties. One of the parties — the Democrats — had imploded at its convention in May and split into two factions. The second party — the Republicans — did not exist seven years prior. And the third party — the Constitutional Unionist — did not exist seven months prior.

The 1860 election also marked the collapse of the Presidential election system that had been devised by the Founders in 1787, and their attempt to build a system that required candidates who sought the Presidency to acquire a national following with strength in all areas of the country. None of the four candidates in 1860 were able to do this (and no single candidate for President would win a majority of the vote in both the North and South again until 1932): Continue reading

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On the idea of a “taxpayer’s receipt”

There’s a new white paper out from Third Way, a progressive think tank, that is making a lot of headlines on various blogs for its proposal that all taxpayers receive an itemized “receipt” showing where their taxes go. As an example of what the receipt would entail, look at the graphic from Third Way.

Intuitively, this is a nice idea. It lets the average person see very clearly that the cost of some things (like war and social program entitlements) is enormous compared to the cost of other things (like the salaries of members of Congress). It lets the average person develop a more-informed opinion about how certain spending cuts would affect the budget. And, not unimportantly, it reminds people that the federal taxes pay for actual, you know, things. That cost actual money.

However, there are significant drawbacks to this idea, at least as currently proposed. Enough so that I don’t think I would endorse this as good policy, and I worry that fixing the concerns would destroy the gains achieved through teh simplicity of the Third Way example. Here are five concerns: Continue reading

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On The Idea of Repealing the 17th Amendment

It sure looks like the summer of 2010 is destined to be remembered as the time when everyone seemed to want to get themselves some Constitutional amending. And I’m not talking about your garden-variety balanced-budget amendment or flag-burning amendment or school prayer amendment or line-item veto amendment or any of the other 75 or so amendments that have been proposed in the 111th Congress. I’m talking about stuff like repealing the 14th amendment. Can’t say I saw that coming!

Still, repealing the 14th amendment makes for a boring discussion, because it quickly devolves either into an immigration debate — in which the probability of someone saying something new or interesting (minimal) is only slightly greater than the probability of anyone revising their opinion (infinitesimal) — or, even worse, a debate about race, in which both probabilities are highly likely to be exactly zero.

The same cannot be said for the idea of repealing the 17th amendment, which provides for the direct election of United States Senators. Unlike the 14th amendment, it makes for a rather interesting topic of conversation: it’s not exactly well-worn territory, so there are a lot of fresh thoughts. It doesn’t inherently evoke any partisan or ideological emotions, so people are often willing to think about it at face value.  And since the 17th amendment is a purely structural amendment —  a decision about how the basic framework of the national government should be constructed —  it’s right in the wheelhouse of anyone who spends their free time thinking about the institutional design of the United States Senate (ahem).

Without further ado… Continue reading

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Research Note: Defining “the South”

Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve seen claims made about “the south.” Things like polling data that reported regional cross-tabs, political analysts claiming something distinctive about the region and the 2010 election, or just a friend conjecturing about some regional cultural phenomenon. And, as usual, none of the sources defined what they meant by “the south.” Which makes it pretty hard to assess the claim. Of course, part of the problem is that’s there’s not really any utterly stable definition; it depends what you are talking about it.

This is more extreme than it first appears. Continue reading

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Executive Power: A quick note from the Kagan hearing

In response to a question about executive war power and the detention of enemy combatants, Kagan said that the Obama administration (through the Office of the Solicitor General and the DOJ) has grounded its opinion of its power not under inherent Article II powers, but instead under the statutory powers granted by Congress under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq and Afghanistan (AUMF). Fair enough.

She then went on to talk about the famous “Youngstown” test as articulated by Justice Jackson: a question of Presidential authoriy can fall into one of three situation. First, when Congress has specifically authorized the President to act; second, when Congress has been silent; and third, when Congress has specifically barred the activity in question. The first should be given the widest lattitude, the second somewhat less, and the last should be given the least latitude.

Conveniently, the argument is that the AUMF puts Continue reading

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RIP: Robert Byrd

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia passed away early this morning. He will be remembered for many things, some good and some bad. He was the longest-serving Senator in American history, having served over 51 years. He was a staunch institutional defender of Congress in an age of Presidential supremancy, perhaps the last true Whig. And he is the last of the old-line southern Democrats, a once-upon-a-time member of the Klan and active participant in the filibuster against the civil rights act in 1964 (Byrd has long since renounced — and apologized for — both things). Continue reading

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Getting your way: lessons from pick-up hoops dispute resolution

I play a lot of pick-up basketball, mostly at a park near my house that has a bunch of full-court setups, lights for night play, and almost always at least one decent game going during any hours I’m thinking of playing. The competition is good, and there are enough regulars that the rules and norms are pretty well entrenched; you can show up, inquire about next, jump on a team, and not have to worry about the ground rules.

It doesn’t really matter, though; the games play by pretty much the standard pick-up structure: games straight to 11, everything counts for one, call your own fouls by saying “ball,” no backcourt, checks from half-court after out of bounds turnovers, only call un-ignorable violations (like egregious carries or  travels) and never call offensive fouls, unless you want to fess up to it yourself (like a hideous over-the-back). Winners stay on the court, whoever has next builds a team with the first four guys who asked him, and a queue of nexts builds behind that. All very standard.

What interests me, from both a basketball and non-basketball standpoint, is how disputes both within the game and within the queue structure for next are settled. Continue reading

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On southern nationalism…

There’s a house in my town that prominently flies the confederate battle flag on a flagpole in the middle of the front yard.

Now, that’s not something you see every day in northern Virginia. Sure, seemingly every highway here is named after Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, or Robert E. Lee. And yeah, many of the high school mascots are still “Rebels.” But all that stuff… Continue reading

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On the idea of “anti-incumbency”

You really can’t swing a dead cat around the chattering class these days without hearing about the “anti-incumbent” situation both political parties are facing this primary season and then this November. It’s really become the CW of a wide stripe of armchair political analysts, both the (over)paid type on TV and their counterparts at your water cooler. Judging by those two bellwethers, you’d think that most of the House was in serious danger of losing this fall.

I agree  that there’s something very interesting (and perhaps quite unusual) going on right now in American electoral politics. But I’m skeptical that “anti-incumbency” is the right word for it.The supposed evidence has significant flaws: there was no incumbent running in PA-12. there’s no incumbent running for Senate in Florida. There’s no incumbent running for Senate in Kentucky. The Pennsylvania Senate race featured an incumbent who was facing a new primary electorate for the first time.

But, you say, what about the other primaries? Continue reading

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