Volume 7, Issue 2

With a new administration in office and running the machinery of government, The Forum authors appear to have returned to some enduring concerns from the election and the transition. Michael Crespin, Charles Finocchiaro, and Emily Wanless return to the issue of earmarks and attack the conventional wisdom about them. Byron Shafer and Amber Wichowsky bring back the argument about the democratic values attaching to caucuses versus primaries and apply a unique ‚natural experiment‘ to them. Brian Arbour asks what really would have happened had the Democratic nominating contest been run under the actual Republican rules and comes to some provocative conclusions. Alan Siaroff tackles the same issue in a different way and locates the impact of Democratic rules in some surprising places. Travis Ridout asks what recent nominating campaigns have shown us about an emerging conventional wisdom on old versus new means of campaigning and finds that the old retain a strong sticking power. Nicholas Seabrook goes looking for the geographical story of the election result, most especially for the impact of geographic clusters within it. And Harold Wilensky looks at American healthcare in comparative perspective, asking what it would take to make the U.S. converge with other developed nations. Lastly, Benjamin Bishin addresses new work from Sunshine Hillygus and Mark Shields on ‚wedge issues‘, and asks where such concerns may be going.

Earmarks added to appropriations bills have generated a considerable amount of attention from the media, politicians, and fiscal watchdog groups. Taken as a whole, three “truths" about earmarks are frequently discussed: 1) earmarks are the reason for large budget deficits, 2) using omnibus legislation instead of regular order leads to more earmarks, and 3) “airdropped" earmarks added at the conference stage compound the problem of pork. In this paper, we examine these “truths" and find the conventional wisdom does not stand up to empirical tests. Finally, we show how Congress easily worked around new rules concerning the addition of earmarks at the conference stage.

The presidential nominating contest of 2008 resurrected an earlier debate about the democratic impact of the main institutional alternatives for delegate selection. This time, however, the debate came packaged with a major 'natural experiment' comparing the impact of primaries versus caucuses, courtesy of the Democratic Party of Texas which actually used both institutions on the same day to select different parts of the Texas delegation. Evidence from their simultaneous use suggests that the power of strong racial and ethnic attachments is not much influenced by the choice of institutions. Yet the same evidence suggests that the power of social class and class position is powerfully influenced by just such a choice. This result appears to present a particularly sharp dilemma for the self-conscious party of the less advantaged, the Democrats.

Did the Democratic rules for delegate allocation cost Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination in 2008? Did these same rules prolong the contest, creating further division within the Democratic Party? I address these two questions by “re-running" the 2008 Democratic primaries under a different set of delegate allocation rules—the ones used in the Republican nominating contest. Under these rules, Hillary Clinton would have held a four-delegate advantage at the end of the primaries and caucuses. The race would then have been decided by delegates selected at state conventions and by the Republican version of “super-delegates." So while Clinton would have benefitted under Republican rules, the use of these rules would not have given her the nomination. And Republican rules would have produced a more prolonged and divisive contest for the Democratic nomination.

The long-lasting race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination finished with Obama winning a clear majority of the pledged delegates. Yet he did not win a majority of all votes cast, and indeed the popular vote total was extremely close. This article assesses how a close vote total translated into a delegate victory for Obama. Three factors are assessed: malapportionment in terms of delegates per state, a strong abstention (low turnout) effect in the caucuses, and the disqualification of the Florida results. Numerically the abstention effect not just in the caucuses as a whole but across the various caucuses was the most significant factor.

Several trends, both societal and technological, suggest that televised political advertising should be losing its position at the center of today's political campaign, but is this the case? Analyzing ad-tracking data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential nominating campaigns, I show that the use of televised political advertising has, if anything, increased over time. Although campaigns may be focusing more nowadays on micro-targeting and "ground war" tactics, they have far from abandoned the traditional 30-second political spot.

This paper investigates patterns of geographic clustering in the county vote for the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008. Using local indicators of spatial association (LISA), the statistically significant areas of Democratic and Republican support are identified for both elections, thereby uncovering major sources of spatial autocorrelation in recent presidential voting. Most interestingly, the change in the presidential vote from 2004 to 2008 appears to be significantly more spatially dependent than the raw vote itself, suggesting that the so-called "Obama Effect" also exhibits a high degree of geographic clustering.

Among the 19 rich democracies I have studied for the past 40 years, the United States is odd-man-out in its health-care spending, organization, and results. The Obama administration might therefore find lessons from abroad helpful as it moves toward national health insurance. In the past hundred years, with the exception of the U.S., the currently rich democracies have all converged in the broad outlines of health care. They all developed central control of budgets with financing from compulsory individual and employer contributions and/or government revenues. All have permitted the insured to supplement government services with additional care, privately purchased. All, including the United States, have rationed health care. All have experienced a growth in doctor density and the ratio of specialists to primary-care personnel. All evidence a trend toward public funding. Our deviance consists of no national health insurance, a huge private sector, a very high ratio of specialists to primary-care physicians and nurses, and a uniquely expensive (non)system with a poor cost-benefit ratio. The cure: increase the public share to more than 65% from its present level of 45%. In regards to funding the transition cost and the permanent cost of guaranteed universal coverage: no rich democracy has funded national health insurance without relying on mass taxes, especially payroll and consumption taxes. Whatever we do to begin, broad-based taxes will be the outcome. Three explanations of "why no national health insurance in the U.S.?" are examined.