Social media are an elite concern at this point in time, limited in their reach and somewhat unsuited for mass political campaigns except through SMS. Still, they are important for convincing the reluctant voters in the Blackberry class that as a tech-savvy politician, you might be someone they would like to do business with.

Bingo. Twitter won’t overthrow any country until it becomes an everyday part of life and Facebook isn’t really of much value if you live in a village without electricity. SMS, by contrast, is an everyday part of life in many developing countries and is playing a role in political mobilization.

…next August, we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility.  The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground…

Clear. As. Mud.

The countries with the largest Muslim population (Indonesia) and the third largest Muslim population (India) are democracies. Close to one in four Muslims live in these two countries. If something is true nearly 25% of the time, I’d say it is far more than a theoretical possibility.

The rejoinder to this argument is typically “well, what I really meant was Arabs.” This is true: there are no Arab democracies. Yet since Arabs account for only 20% of all Muslims, using “Muslim” as a synonym for “Arab” doesn’t work very well. Moreover, Arab is an ethnic group, not a religion, so using Islam (i.e., a religion) as an argument for why Arabs (i.e., an ethnic group) can’t be democrats doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

Question: Why is there so little on USAID’s website about this impressive accomplishment?

Answer: I don’t know.

Elmo is stumped

Insofar as the Afghan government refuses to deliver on the promises our [US government] money has purchased, it has to be challenged. It has to be made to understand that a failure to take at least some steps toward reform will eventually produce unpleasant consequences, as American support, already wavering, dwindles down to a few hardcore neocons gathered together in a single room. All of which is to say, Washington’s current fight against corruption is mainly about American, not Afghan, hearts and minds.

Representative Nita Lowey’s recent circus hearings on corruption in Afghanistan lend some credibility to this argument.

First, as Gary Cox observed in Making Votes Count, Duverger’s Law holds at the district level, not the national level. That a plurality system could produce two parties at the district level, but many more at the national level is perfectly consistent with Durverger’s Law.

Second, its not clear that Australia’s election was that much of an outlier. Examining the district-level returns (where we expect Duverger’s Law to hold) shows that on average there were 2.6 effective parties in its 2009 election in each single-member electoral district. This is only a bit higher than Australia’s long-term average of 2.3 and not that much higher than the US’s long-term average of 2.4.

I think its a pit premature to put a toe tag on Durverger’s Law.

Long story short, this difference between Europe and the U.S. is…not really due to a national culture that promotes a refusal to accept personal responsibility or anything like that. It’s mostly institutional in nature, and the incentives of our institutions point in the direction of more lawsuits instead of more regulations.

Answers that focus on institutions and incentives instead of culture are more persuasive to me.