The foie gras lobby

On July 1st, the production and sale of foie gras will become illegal in California, a result of a state law passed back in 2004. Ed Leibowitz at The Atlantic has an entertaining story about some of the lobbying surrounding this new law. According to the article, over 100 chefs are now lobbying for the reversal of the law, and they have some effective talking points:

“Foie gras is low-hanging fruit,” [Chef Josiah] Citrin* says, in the resigned tone of someone explaining the obvious. “You think the foie gras industry has money to fight, like the beef industry?” He points out that a class barrier also keeps voters from rallying in defense of foie. “You go out in the street and ask 25 people ‘What do you think about fattened duck liver?’ and they’ll say ‘Ooh, I don’t like that.’ You don’t have to take a poll.”

Citrin has joined a coalition of more than 100 chefs lobbying for the reversal or suspension of the foie gras ban. (The coalition, which insists that it does not oppose animal rights, says it favors the humane treatment of all livestock, waterfowl included.) In a few days, many of the chefs will travel to Sacramento to lobby on foie’s behalf, and in the weeks ahead, high-end restaurants will hold foie-filled dinners to raise funds for their quixotic fight.

On the other side of the issue is the ever-quotable John Burton, the one-time lion of the state legislature and now chair of the state Democratic party:

The chefs’ coalition has warned about the ban’s potential impact on California’s high-end restaurants in a bad economy, and the state’s diminished standing in the world of haute cuisine. “California will no longer be a food destination?,” Burton said. “In other words, a guy’s sitting around and says ‘Let’s go to California. They’ve got these beautiful views. They’ve got Yosemite, the bridges, Universal City, the redwoods. Oh, shit! They don’t have foie gras! Let’s go to South Dakota.’”

Nor did he buy the argument that a restaurant could go broke without foie gras, unless that restaurant’s specialty was incredibly narrow. “If you had the House of Foie Gras, you’d be fucked,” he said.

Anyway, a great story that manages to humanize both sides of a lobbying battle, over an issue on which the vast majority of people probably don't have strong opinions and will never be affected.

*Disclosure: Citrin is a family friend.

Strange bedfellows

Below is California super-lobbyist Artie Samish (bottom left) and the Shah of Iran (top center). I really wonder what they discussed.

(c/o Jake Ehrlich)

Why the recall wasn't a circus

The 2003 California gubernatorial recall was supposed to be a circus. You only needed $3,000 and a few dozen signatures to be on the replacement ballot, and the parties had no primaries to cull the number of candidates. Soon the ballot contained 135 candidates, including Gary Coleman, Gallagher, Mary Carey, Larry Flynt, and a certain Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor. Journalists and politicians issued all sorts of warnings about the dangers of this recall, suggesting that the replacement governor could take office with as little as 10 percent of the vote. In fact, three candidates split 94 percent of the vote, and the plurality winner came within a point of a clear majority. The election results looked surprisingly normal and un-circus-like.

How did this happen? In an article that's out in the new State Politics and Policy Quarterly, I argue that the parties imposed order on what would otherwise have been a chaotic environment. The article focuses specifically on the Republicans, noting how party leaders rallied around Schwarzenegger (whom they'd been grooming for office for a few years) and pressured other candidates to step out of the race through a combination of conversations, endorsements, and donations.

Incumbents versus activists in California

I mentioned a while back the efforts by California Republicans to adapt to Proposition 14, the top-two primary system that voters approved last fall. The party had originally proposed conducting pre-primary endorsements of preferred candidates, so Republican voters would have an idea of whom the party preferred going into a primary election. This proposal, put forward by state party chair Ron Nehring, included a litmus test: the party would not endorse its own incumbents if they had supported a tax increase or if they had endorsed a candidate of another party in a general election.

Well, surprise surprise, the incumbents didn't like this plan. No, none of them plan to vote for a tax increase, but they don't like having their hands tied by the party and they don't like facing an automatic penalty for any future decision they might make. So incumbents on the party's rules committee recently amended the litmus test portion of the proposal to appear as follows:

Nine months prior to the close off filing, any incumbent legislator, statewide elected official, member of Congress, United States Senator, or member of the State Board of Equalization seeking re-election to the same office my request an early nomination. Any such request shall be conveyed to the Board of Directors. If no director objects within 30 days of receipt thereof, then such incumbent will be deemed the nominee. In the event of an objection, the Board of Directors shall vote on such nomination and may elect such incumbent as the nominee by majority vote. The Board of Directors may withdraw a nomination by a two thirds votes.

In other words, the re-nomination of the incumbents is automatic unless party officials take serious and rapid steps to stop it. This is, to my mind, a perfect manifestation of the traditional struggle between party activists and officeholders. You'd think they'd agree on just about all areas of substance, and they largely do, at least at first. Republican incumbents in California have largely been selected through the processes of socialization and nomination to be very conservative. Yes, occasionally a moderate like Abel Maldonado or Arnold Schwarzenegger will sneak through, but that's very rare. (Notably, Schwarzenegger only got in through the 2003 recall, which had no primary.)

So why would party activists be concerned about their ability to punish incumbents for un-Republican behavior? Because politicians are unreliable partisans once they're in office. They quickly learn that party activists are not the only people in their districts, and they figure they can increase their electoral safety margin by moderating somewhat. They also might get to know legislators in the other party and discover that they have good ideas once in a while. On top of that, many politicians have an innate desire to win the approval of others. Advancing an agenda is good, but being popular has its appeals, too.

If Republican party activists just elected good people and let them do their jobs, there's no telling what might happen. They could vote to balance the budget by raising taxes! They might be persuaded that public schools are underperforming and vote to raise teacher pay! They might decide that, as much as they personally despise abortion, it's not right to force poor women to carry a baby to term! Cats and dogs sleeping together! Mass hysteria!

So the party likes to keep the axe of de-nomination hanging precipitously and visibly over incumbents' heads. They don't use it that often because they don't have to; Republican incumbents know they'll be punished for going too moderate, so they stay conservative. The party keeps the skulls of apostates like Abel Maldonado on pikes atop the castle walls as reminders.

Update: The state GOP has also proposed conducting its own mail-in nomination contest among registered Republican voters.

(h/t Eric McGhee)

Comparing politicians and their districts

Are elected officials good representatives of their districts? That's actually a difficult question for political scientists to answer, in part because our measures are poor. We have plenty of good measures of the partisanship of elected officials, most of them deriving from roll call votes. We also have good measures of the partisanship of voters, most of them deriving from surveys and election results. But directly comparing voters and politicians is hard when we don't have a common scale.

Hans Noel and I try to remedy this in a new article (gated or ungated, PDF) in Political Research Quarterly. Our approach is to examine votes on legislative referenda in California. That's when state legislators vote on a bill and then send the exact same text onto the voters -- it's one of the only times that voters and politicians are voting on precisely the same thing. We use these referenda votes as "bridges" between legislators and their districts. Then we can put legislators' roll call votes and districts' votes on initiatives onto the same scale and generate comparable ideal points for districts and legislators.

How do they look? Well, it looks like legislators are a lot more polarized than their districts. There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district.

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

We don't need any stinkin' primaries

Remember how California created a top-two primary system last year designed to help de-polarize the state legislature? And you know how I'm always saying that parties find a way to overcome regulations designed to weaken them? Well, guess what the California Republican Party is trying to do -- nominate candidates prior to the primary election. This would come in the form of a pre-primary endorsement that could include funding and mentions in party literature.

Their new rules even contain a litmus test. Incumbents are automatically re-nominated, unless they've done one of the following:

(a) voted for a tax increase as scored by the Legislative Analyst, (b) voted to put a tax increase on the ballot as scored by the Legislative Analyst, (c) voted against an official position of the Caucus, (d) endorsed or supported a non-Republican candidate over a Republican candidate for an elected office.

Okay, I suppose that list is a bit redundant. If you've voted for a tax increase, you've probably voted against an official position of the Caucus. But whatever.

Some interesting questions remain, of course. Will this new system produce more or less polarized legislators than the previous one? What happens if the party converges on one good party candidate but a different one manages to win in the primary? Will the party back the second-best conservative as the true Republican?

Good stuff to watch.

(h/t Eric McGhee and Wesley Hussey)

More on seating arrangements and voting

Just to expand on my previous post, a few years ago I wrote an article investigating the influence of legislative seating arrangements on roll call votes. We know there are all sorts of influences on the way legislators vote, including party leaders, the executive branch, constituents, etc. Did legislators also follow the votes of the people sitting near them?

Seating chart for the 1949
California Assembly

I investigated this using the California Assembly, where legislators sit in pairs. Usually, member-pairs are of the same party, but that wasn't always the case. The diagram at left shows the seating arrangements for the 1949 Assembly, with Republicans in gray and Democrats in white.

The paper finds that deskmates tended to vote together, even controlling for party, constituency preferences, and many other influences. Just sitting together made any given pair of legislators anywhere from two to six percent more likely to vote the same way.

All this is to say that Sen. Mark Udall isn't nuts when he claims that having senators sit together might change the way they behave. And he's not the first -- California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown used seating assignments to enforce party-line voting, to pair freshmen up with veterans for socialization purposes, and even to separate and punish those who conspired against him. I can't believe that sitting together for one 90-minute speech, as Udall is proposing, will make much of a difference, but the idea that neighbors can influence each other has some support.

The price of inexperience

Kyle Baker alerts me to this story about the rather inauspicious end of this year's session of the California Assembly.

For the Assembly, the curtain fell at midnight Tuesday after a final hour marked by animosity that began with a partisan fight that ultimately killed legislation to ban the open display of unloaded guns in most public places.

When the smoke finally cleared, Republicans and Democrats were blaming each other for the verbal scuffle -- and Democratic Assemblywoman Lori Saldana was accusing her party leaders of ineptitude.

[...]

The political slugfest began about 10:50 p.m., when Saldana began to present her controversial gun-carrying ban on the Assembly floor with only 70 minutes before the end of this year's regular session and, therefore, the deadline for acting upon majority-vote bills.

Republicans quickly made it clear they planned to "run out the clock" by debating until midnight the controversial measure, Assembly Bill 1934, which called for outlawing the open public display of guns, with exceptions that include law enforcement purposes, hunting, target ranges and ceremonies.

Democrats were alarmed by the GOP's stalling tactic because they had about a half-dozen other bills to take up, all of which were doomed if debate on AB 1934 lasted the entire hour.

I can't claim to be an expert on Saldana's bill, but it sounds like kind of a silly, symbolic one that would have done basically nothing to curb violence.  Now, if it was a bill that was important to the majority leadership, fine -- send the message out that it's important.  If it's an embarrassment to the leadership, keep it off the floor.  But it doesn't sound like they particularly cared about it one way or another, and they were rather surprised to find the minority party engaging in delaying tactics toward the end of the session.  (Duh! Read Koger's book!)

To me, this sounds like one of the down sides of term limits, which has produced a party leadership with only a few years of collective experience under its belt.  The Speaker, while a bright and interesting man, is a freshman, for Heaven's sake.  Situations like that lead to a majority party getting rolled.

Polarized voters in California

Over at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, Alan Abramowitz has a nice post about California's recent adoption of the top-two primary, suggesting that it really won't do much to affect legislative polarization.  Why?  Because the state's voters are already incredibly polarized -- more so than the American people in general.  Note this helpful chart:

As the chart suggests, California Democrats are much further left than national Democrats, although California Republicans look pretty much like national Republicans.  Also, Abramowitz notes, liberals and conservatives are geographically concentrated in a few key areas.  If San Francisco liberals are so far left, and there are pretty much no conservatives in the area, then legislative districts in that area will keep electing far-left liberals.

It's interesting to note the slight discontinuity between Abramowitz's voter graph above and Boris Shor's graph of elected officials.  In the latter, California's Republican legislators constitute the most conservative legislative party in the country.  And in general, it's worth remembering that elected officials tend to be more ideologically extreme than their districts.  So the graph above only tells a part of the story about legislative polarization.

(h/t Brendan Nyhan)

California's Top-Two Primary

So California is going to try the Louisiana-style primary.  I can't say I'm thrilled that Californians voted for Prop. 14.  For one thing, it means that this blog doesn't have nearly the political impact I thought it did.  For another, I just don't think it's a particularly good law.  As I've mentioned before, the research on this subject suggests that this won't do a whole lot to reduce partisanship in California's legislature, and even if it did, weak partisanship isn't necessarily something to aspire to.  Beyond that, this new law will reduce the number of minority party candidates appearing on the general election ballot.  If you like to vote Peace & Freedom or Libertarian or Green, or if you're a San Francisco Republican or an Orange County Democrat, you're not going to find many candidates from your party on the general election ballot anymore.

It's not terribly surprising that this initiative won, of course, as it was prominently opposed by leaders of both major parties in the state at a time when they're historically unpopular.  I imagine the calculation many voters made was, The parties hate 14, I hate the parties, ergo I like 14.  Indeed, it's fitting that the initiative passed in every county save two -- Orange County and San Francisco, probably the two most openly partisan counties in the state and the hearts of the state's Republican and Democratic establishments, respectively. 

All this said, I'm actually curious what will happen, assuming the lawsuits against Prop. 14 fall flat.  We actually don't have very many cases of states trying this sort of primary system.  Maybe it will measurably reduce legislative partisanship.  And while California's own history shows weak partisanship to be dangerous, the state currently has partisanship to spare.  Of course, partisanship is far from the state's major problem right now, but at least from a research perspective, I'll be watching to see what we can learn.

The Top-Two Primary

If you have 45 minutes or so to kill in the car and you're interested in the topic of primaries, I encourage you to listen to this forum on KQED on the topic of California's Proposition 14, which comes up for a vote next month.  (Prop. 14 would create a Louisiana-style top-two primary, in which all candidates of all parties appear on the same primary ballot, and then the top two vote-getters go to a runoff, even if they're of the same party.)

The forum opens with a brief interview with the PPIC's Eric McGhee (a friend and co-author of mine) about the possible effects of switching from a closed primary to an open top-two one.  Does it make legislators more moderate and legislatures less polarized?  Well, maybe.  McGhee cites evidence suggesting that the effect would be small to nonexistent.

Then the forum turns to California's new lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado, one of the main proponents of Prop. 14, and Richard Winger, one of the initiative's more prominent opponents.  Maldonado's performance is, in my humble opinion, a trainwreck.  He proceeds to list one complaint after another about the state government -- it's broken, it's broke, legislators are highly partisan, they spend too much time on silly issues, they can't pass a budget, politicians misrepresent themselves to voters, etc. -- but then says that the solution is a top-two primary.  He never really explains how the latter would correct the former.

Meanwhile, Winger, to his credit, employs actual evidence debunking each of Maldonado's claims one by one.  You say more open primaries would make it easier to pass a budget?  Well, it turns out the budget was plenty late during Calfornia's use of the blanket primary a decade ago.  You say it would make the legislature less partisan?  Washington state used a blanket primary for decades, and their legislature is one of the most partisan in the country.  And so on.  And all Maldonado does is keep saying, "I've lived it.  I've been there."  And then he repeats his talking points.  It's not a very impressive spectacle.

I've popped off on this topic before, but just to recap: I tend to be an advocate of strong parties.  California's own experience with weak parties under cross-filing (1914-59) was not particularly inspiring -- the legislature was corrupt and easily swayed by powerful personalities and moneyed interests, and voters had no idea whom, if anyone, to throw out of office if they were dissatisfied.  But okay, maybe you still want a less polarized legislature.  Fine.  Would a top-two primary get you there?  Not really.  The evidence we have suggests that the effect would be small or negligible.  There turns out to be very little relationship between a state legislature's partisanship and the openness of its primary elections.  Meanwhile, you'll end up with many runoff elections between members of the same party, giving voters not of that party a lot less incentive to participate.

Update: Typo fixed.

KCRA interview

I'm in the middle of my northern California tour right now.  Things are going really well, and right now I'm sitting outside a La Bou cafe across from the state capitol drinking coffee and taking advantage of free wi-fi and gorgeous weather.  So far things are going very well.  I had a really nice interview this morning on Sacramento's NBC affiliate.  They gave me three and a half minutes, which I think is more time than they devoted to national politics in total.  And the reporter had actually read some of my book, which was much appreciated.

Majority rule breaking out all over

New California Assembly Speaker John Pérez is seeking to change the state's constitution to allow budgets to pass with a simple majority vote.  Supermajority budget passage rules are far from the state's only problem, but they're a big one.  Good luck, Mr. Speaker.