The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Policy Viewpoints

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Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints

Mednicoff Contributes to Boston Globe, PBS, NPR

David Mednicoff, assistant professor of public policy and an expert on Middle East politics, has been widely cited in recent media articles and interviews about the Tunisian uprising.  In an article in this Sunday’s Boston Globe, Mednicoff explores what the situation in Tunisia suggests about the role of secular governments in ensuring stability and democracy in the Middle East.  Mednicoff also has been interviewed on WFCR by Bob Paquette; on the Emily Rooney show on WGBH radio; and on WGBY’s Connecting Points.

David Mednicoff is also acting director of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program and a member of the Five College Program in Middle Eastern Studies. He has a broad background in international law and politics. His research focuses on the rule of law in contemporary Arab societies and their prospects for political democratization.

Mednicoff has been a Fulbright scholar in both Morocco and Qatar; other recent awards in support of his research include a grant from Georgetown University to study the regulation of migrant workers in Arab countries and a 2010-2011 (non-resident) research fellowship from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is a frequent commentator in the media on issues related to politics in the Middle East, and has presented his work to policymakers in Washington at forums sponsored by the Department of State and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Policy Viewpoints

Badgett’s Financial Resolutions Appear on NYT Bucks Blog

The New York Time’s “Bucks Blog” featured the New Year financial resolutions of CPPA Director Lee Badgett this week. Lee, who is also a professor of economics and director of the William’s Institute at UCLA, resolved to “make some financial choices.”  Faced with a plethora of investment options and beginning to plan for her family’s retirement and other long-term needs, Lee acknowledged the difficulty of making decisions when given too many choices. Read the full post here.

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Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints

Folbre explores “Motherhood Penalty” on Economix

folbre

Nancy Folbre is not only a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but also a writer for the New York Times blog, Economix. Recently, Folbre posted about recent research on women and the “motherhood penalty,” or the loss of wages upon having children, by faculty associate Michelle Budig, Professor of Sociology. Her primary comment regarding Budig’s research was that many high-income women running for office in this election cycle may be unaware of the trend of women with the lowest earnings suffering most from the motherhood penalty. For the full article, click here.

Folbre is a leading expert on care policy and is the author of several well-known books, including The Field Guide to the U.S. Economy. Other recent books include Saving State U: Fixing Public Higher Education; Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas; Warm Hands in Cold Age: Gender and Aging; The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values; and Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family. She also maintains a personal research blog, Care Talk, and is a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Folbre has consulted for the United Nations Human Development Office, the World Bank, and other organizations.

Economix puts economics, which the Times describes as “the study of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day,” in a simpler and more relatable manner for those of us who have forgotten everything we had learned from ECON101. Folbre writes for this blog weekly. For the full article about Budig’s research, click here.

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Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints

Jeff Thompson To Speak on Economic Development in New England

Jeffrey Thompson, assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute, will speak on “Economic Development in New England: A Positive Growth Agenda” on Monday, November 1, at 12 p.m. in Thompson 620.  The talk is part of CPPA’s Fall 2010 Faculty Colloquium.

Thompson will describe his recent research on the role of public investment in stimulating state economic development.  According to his findings, investing in state infrastructure and workforce development produces far higher returns for New England states than corporate tax breaks and subsidies for private employers.  Investments in education and public sector projects—such as bridge reconstruction, clean energy production, and improved sanitation—generate manifold benefits.  Such activities are eligible for federal matching funds, for example, and typically employ local workers and capital. 

In addition, public infrastructure is critical to economic growth and development, and New England’s aging infrastructure is badly in need of repair.

Policies to address the nation’s current economic crisis are often perceived as limited at the state level, but Thompson’s conclusions suggest important steps that state policymakers could take in spurring short- and long-term job creation and regional economic growth.  

Thompson received a doctorate in economics from Syracuse University and joined PERI in 2009. His expertise is in domestic economic policy and public finance, with a particular emphasis on New England.  Prior to his doctoral work, Thompson was a labor analyst at the Oregon Center for Public Policy.  Thompson also holds a masters degree in economics from the New School for Social Research.  He will teach a graduate level course on state and local government finance at CPPA in the fall semester of 2011.

This talk is free and open to the public.  Brownbag lunches are welcome. For additional information, go to www.masspolicy.org or contact Kathy Colón (kcolon@pubpol.umass.edu).

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Policy Viewpoints

Election reform and the Oscars

As you may have heard, the Academy Awards will be happening on Sunday night.  Although Avatar seems like the inevitable choice for best picture (although I’m hoping that my personal favorite, “A Serious Man,” is a Serious Dark-Horse Candidate), there are certain aspects of the best picture race that still make it intriguing AND tie in to election reform, as unlikely as that might seem. First, there are ten best picture nominees, the most since 1943.  This is a good thing publicity-wise, promoting interest in lesser-known but high quality films. But, with so many candidates, how well will the winner actually reflect the will of the voters?

The answer is instant-runoff voting.  Election reform advocates have been working for this type of voting system for a while but it has yet to catch on widely.  In a typical, single-round election with more than two candidates, the winner only needs a plurality to win: he or she needs only to garner the most votes of anyone on the ballot, not necessarily a majority–50% plus 1–of voters.  This is obviously problematic because the system fails to adequately register voters’ preferences.  Let’s take as an example the 2000 presidential elections, specifically in Florida.  Let’s say that your absolute favorite candidate is everyone’s favorite elderly consumer-rights advocate, Ralph Nader.  If Nader doesn’t win, though, you’d MUCH prefer Gore to win over Bush.  However, you’ve only got a single vote, and by awarding it to Nader, you’ve essentially helped Bush by depriving Gore, the only other candidate you like, of your vote.  If the margin between Bush and Gore is small enough, a very small number of Nader voters who would by all accounts prefer Gore to Bush can tilt the election toward Bush.

This is a systemic problem with the American voting system: a vote for a third- (or fourth-) party candidate is essentially a vote for your least-favorite candidate.  This has resulted in a panoply of ills: a rigid, two-party system, national politics that is dominated by corporate money, personality politics and frivolity, and the inability of many views to be represented at all.  The two major parties are, of course, opposed to election reform because our current system is heavily weighted against the emergence of strong third parties, which is part of the reason it’s so difficult to effect meaningful change in the first place.  Regular runoffs–where a second election is held with the top two vote-getters if no one candidate garners a majority–are a definite improvement, but they still typically result in a vote between the two establishment candidates.

In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their preference for every candidate in order.  In the 2000 election scenario, a Nader voter would rank Nader 1, Gore 2, and Bush 3.  Now here’s the cool part: if no candidate has a majority, the votes start being re-allocated.  Since Nader is the lowest vote-getter, his voters’ votes will be allocated to whatever their second preference is, in this case Gore.  In other words, there would no longer be wasted votes: expressing your preference for a minor candidate would not prevent your vote from going toward a more viable candidate, if your first choice is the lowest vote-getter.  (Note that for fields of more than 3 candidates, this process is iterative: the votes of the lowest vote-getter are reallocated, then the next-lowest etc. until at least one candidate has a majority).

The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story up recently about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach for Oscar balloting, and the implications for political elections.  Who knows, maybe instant runoffs will start catching on!

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Policy Viewpoints

Prison-based gerrymandering

Today on NPR, David Sommerstein from the Prison Policy Institute–based in nearby Northampton!–talked about prison-based gerrymandering.  As with many stories that have been featured in the run-up to the 2010 census, this one has implications beyond simply accounting for the number of people in a given area.

It turns out that prisoners’ legal residences are their prison cell, not where they call home or where they were living before they were convicted.  However, since in most cases prisoners can’t vote, the actual voting populations in precincts that host prisons have disproportionate influence.  This is because for congressional districts that wouldn’t meet the minimum population requirement except for their prison population, fewer voters are controlling a single representative, giving each voter more pull over the political process than voters in districts that meet the minimum requirement.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world: as of 2008, 1 in 100 Americans was in the penal system.  One reason for this is cultural: the prevalence and fear of violent crime and American ethos of individualism and personal responsibility mean that being “tough on crime”–showing zero tolerance for law-breakers and making the penal code ever more punitive–is always a political winner.  Since prisoners–and in many states, ex-cons–cannot vote, there is insufficient countervailing electoral influence against these policies by those with a personal stake, which is undemocratic on its own.

Another reason for our high incarceration rate is economic.  Prisons are a key source of employment in many areas with few other options, particularly rural areas.  This primes the pump for even increasing incarceration rates.  As long as there is a net transfer of population to rural areas from urban areas, where most crime happens, the voting power of people in those rural areas will increase relative to prisoners’ urban points of origin.  These people will then use this power to support policies that they may already agree with–e.g. mandatory minimum sentencing–but that also happen to correspond with their economic interests.  This trend is self-reenforcing: building more prisons will bring more electoral power, which will lead to more prisons, and so forth.  In essence, this system incentivizes voters to increase the punitiveness of law enforcement for reasons that have nothing to do with crime prevention or prisoner rehabilitation; in fact, this system has an interest in locking up as many people as possible (despite the fact that the violent crime rate has been falling for decades–see the Prison Policy Initiative’s website for a multitude of data).

Moreover, we are not just talking about individual voters making self-interested decisions.  The so-called Prison-Industrial Complex is by some accounts a $50 billion industry, and the companies that run private prisons have every incentive to expand their operations.  Like any other industry with an interest in political outcomes, operators of private prisons are able to influence voters and public officials to further their desired outcomes.  Here that means more prisoners and more prisons.

The outrageous racial, gender and class inequalities perpetuated by the prison system notwithstanding, this is just one of numerous situations where people have noticed a flaw in the election system and used it to put their thumb on the scale of political power to accomplish ends that benefit them but incur costs on society.  Yet, the solution to this electoral loophole would be simple: count prisoners as residents of their own communities, not their prison cells.

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Policy Viewpoints

The beginning of the end for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

It was reported this past Tuesday that Dan Choi, a gay national guardsman who has become one of the most public faces of the movement to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, has been allowed to return to his unit. Choi revealed his sexual orientation on The Rachel Maddow Show in March and was subsequently recommended for a dishonorable discharge.   In June,  a panel of officers recommended his discharge under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; a petition circulated by Courage Campaign opposing his dismissal was signed by over 162,000 people.  Talking Points Memo spoke to Sue Fulton, a member of Knights Out, an organization of gay West Point Graduates, who pointed out that while Choi’s discharge is pending, his commanding officer can decide whether or not he should remain with his unit.

Fulton surmises that the commanding officer invited Choi back because, like many observers, he had come to believe that DADT may well be repealed, and therefore that Choi might not ultimately be discharged. “I would view it as a recognition by his unit that Dan’s discharge may, after all, NOT be confirmed by the Army,” she said.

Fulton stressed, though, that it’s unlikely that the decision was made by anyone higher in the chain of command. “National Guard commanders have wide latitude in terms of their units,” she said. “This is not a change in Army policy, nor any action from ‘higher headquarters’ that we are aware of.”

This may simply be one isolated–albeit highly publicized–decision on the part of an individual Guard commander, but its implications are not hard to divine.  The president expressed unqualified support for the repeal of DADT before a joint session of congress during his State of the Union, and on February 2, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought gays and lesbian should be allowed to serve openly, saying that “no matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”  It appears that we are closer than we’ve ever been to allowing gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly and honorably in the armed forces.

Regardless of moral arguments either way, (and according to recent polling, those arguments are becoming more and more one-sided as support for gays serving in the military has burgeoned since DADT was enacted), prohibiting gays from serving openly and discharging them if they are up front about their sexual preference is bad public policy.  According to the DADT issue page at the Center for American Progress, over 13,000 military personnel have been discharged since it was enacted, costing taxpayers $363.8 million.  In addition to the folly of turning away willing enlistees while the armed forces employ stop-loss measures to keep sufficient numbers of “boots on the ground,” this policy has also resulted in the dismissal of over 800 highly trained “mission critical” personnel.  This includes “59 gay Arabic linguists and nine gay Farsi linguists in the last five years,” including Lieutenant Choi.  Moreover, 32 other countries have allowed gays to serve with no major problems.  From a policy standpoint, this is a no-brainer.