Richard Farmer’s chunky bits

Changing leadership election rules. If there is one lesson political parties should have learned from the latest leadership nonsense, it’s that the choice of party leader is far too important to be left to parliamentary politicians alone. The British Labour Party model combining votes from parliamentarians, affiliated trade union members and the party rank-and-file should be introduced ASAP.

The verdict hardly encouraging. With the prospect of a Kevin Rudd Labor leadership takeover now seemingly gone, there has been quite a slump in the prospects of the government hanging on at the next election. As measured by the Crikey Election Indicator based on market prices, the probability of a Labor win is now down to 14.7%. At the end of January the figure was 26.9%

And there is still some scepticism about Labor’s leadership problems being over.

Back to the hard hats and children. Julie Gillard did not wait long after being free of the parliamentary shackles to return to the fluoro vest and hard hat.

And then it was on to the children and a very public demonstration she could be tolerant of misogynists after all.

Lobbying the bureaucracy. It is unusual for the methods big business uses to l0bby governments to be subject to public scrutiny, but the bankruptcy of American company Enron has enabled two American academics to do just that. Senior fellow and visiting professor Lee Drutman and assistant professor of government Daniel J. Hopkins at the Comparative Legislative Research Center of the University of Iowa obtained access to more than 250,000 internal e-mails from Enron that enabled them to observe its political attention between 1999 and 2002. The study has now been published, and there is no dreaded paywall! The full text is well worth the read, but there’s a convenient summary on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. Here’s a taste from the conclusion:

“In studying the attention Enron devoted to various political activities through its e-mails, we find very little evidence consistent with the transactional approach to political influence. Election-related e-mails make up only 1% of Enron’s political e-mails — and even within that 1%, there is scant evidence that Enron’s staffers considered themselves to be buying the support of candidates. Instead, we observe Enron’s political attention to be focused primarily on monitoring and formal participation in rule making and other executive-branch proceedings. Of the emails, 51% focused either on the executive branch (10%), administrative agencies (22%), or advisory commissions (19%) — more than three times the 15% that focused on legislative contacting. Such observations lend descriptive support to the conception of lobbying as engaging in the day-to-day policy details of Washington. The heavy emphasis on formal participation and providing policy information is consistent with theories that view lobbying as information transmission, with influence deriving from making a compelling case. Certainly, Enron had the capacity to make political contributions, and it did so. But perhaps its greater resource was its monopoly on policy-relevant information about electricity, natural gas, and communications markets, information that policy makers could not easily obtain elsewhere. The frequency of monitoring, the large number of legislative meetings, and the special attention to members of energy-related committees in Congress suggest support for a view that treats lobbyists as allies of lawmakers and their staffs as well. Studying influence in politics is notoriously difficult and business influence especially so. But by making extensive use of Enron’s internal documents, this article can extend the insights of survey-based research by observing where the firm directed its political energies and attention.”

News and views noted along the way.

• The Power of austerity over politicians — “Promising tax cuts or spending increases without spelling out the implications in terms of paying for any additional borrowing is what politicians do more often than not. Most of the time they can get away with it, but I suspect they either feel guilty about the implicit deception, or fear they will be found out. So when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.”
• Physicists debate the many varieties of nothingness
• China’s new leader, visiting Russia, promotes nations’ economic and military ties
• The economics of evil Google
• He who makes the rules — “Barack Obama’s biggest second-term challenge isn’t guns or immigration. It’s saving his biggest first-term achievements, like the Dodd-Frank law, from being dismembered by lobbyists and conservative jurists in the shadowy, Byzantine ‘rule-making’ process.”
• The price of fertility: marriage markets and family planning in Bangladesh — “As the price of contraception falls, brides may have to compensate men with higher dowries to attract them into marriage. We estimate the model using data from a successful 1970s family planning experiment in Bangladesh, which lowered average fertility by 0.65 children. We find that the program increased bride-to-groom dowry transfers by at least eighty percent. The response of the marriage market may dampen the welfare benefits of family planning for women.”
• Whole milk or skim? Study links fattier milk to slimmer kids
• Shane Smith: ‘I want to build the next CNN with Vice — it’s within my grasp’ — “Twenty years ago Shane Smith set up a hip little Montreal magazine called Vice. Then along came the internet and Vice reinvented itself as the edgiest, wildest online media brand in the world. It’s staffed by twentysomethings and aimed at a global youth who have no interest in mainstream media.”