Archive for March 2013
Asymmetric Misperceptions and the Conservative Construction of ‘Public Opinion’
There’s been a lot of buzz about an excellent (but not yet peer-reviewed) working paper by David Broockman and Chris Skovron, “What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control,” which looks at state legislative candidates’ perceptions of their constituents’ opinions. The findings are striking, but unlike many others, I don’t find them all that surprising:
Actual district opinion explains only a modest share of the variation in politicians’ perceptions of their districts’ views. Moreover, there is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points.
The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.
The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed…. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard…. If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants….[A] prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone….It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal….
Attorney General (later Justice)Robert Jackson (1940), quoted in Kenneth Culp Davis, Discretionary Justice
Colbert on the Death Penalty
It looks like Maryland will soon get rid of its death penalty, which is a great progressive win. It’s also a win for justice and due process. Kirk Bloodsworth was the first man exonerated from death row on the basis of DNA evidence, one of 142 people convicted and sentence to die since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1973 that was exonerated. He now is an advocate working to rid us of the death penalty state by state, and he appeared on Colbert last night.
Watch the whole thing. Here’s Stephen:
The killing innocent people card is so….easy to win the argument. Because it is the worst thing you can imagine, and if that is true, then no state should have the death penalty. Because if one person dies who is innocent that is too many. That itself is a murder that we are all complicit in, for looking the other way.
Dirty Hippies, Inequality, and the Minnesota Model
The great Mark Price has a piece in the Guardian today, Wealth inequality will keep growing unless workers demand better, that gets to the heart of the problem with our broken economy’s failure to provide the security, opportunity, and basic needs we all deserve. Two points are worth mentioning. First, it’s taken as a matter of faith that conservative prescriptions for the economy are easy to understand and more left-leaning approaches are more complex. I think that’s rubbish. Read Mark here. It’s not difficult at all. If people don’t have jobs, they can’t spend, and we all suffer. If there are way more applicants then there are jobs, there’s no way out of this mess. Inequality is the problem, equality the solution. It’s not that hard. (I made the same point about Robert Reich before). He also discards the silly notion that government has been trying to fix this problem, or that the solutions are unclear. Read the rest of this entry »
A Legalistic Heritage and a Democratic Ideology
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Written by David Kaib
March 14, 2013 at 10:03 am
Posted in Submitted without comment
Tagged with Constitution, Decisions, democracy, James Young, Law, political science, politics, Social Science, Washington DC