Brookings: Topics - Politics and Elections

Banning Filibusters: Is Nuclear Winter Coming to the Senate this Summer?

Sarah A. Binder — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:04:00 -0400

It seems the Senate could have a really hot summer. Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has reportedly threatened to “go nuclear” this July—meaning that Senate Democrats would move by majority vote to ban filibusters of executive and judicial branch nominees. According to these reports, if Senate Republicans block three key nominations (Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas Perez at Labor, and Gina McCarthy at EPA), Reid will call on the Democrats to invoke the nuclear option as a means of eliminating filibusters over nominees.

Jon Bernstein offered a thoughtful reaction to Reid’s gambit, noting that Reid’s challenge is to “find a way to ratchet up the threat of reform in order to push Republicans as far away from that line as possible.” Jon’s emphasis on Reid’s threat is important (and is worth reading in full). Still, I think it’s helpful to dig a little deeper on the role of both majority and minority party threats that arise over the nuclear option.

Before getting to Reid’s threat, two brief detours. First, a parliamentary detour to make plain two reasons why Reid’s procedural gambit is deemed “nuclear.” First, Democrats envision using a set of parliamentary moves that would allow the Senate to cut off debate on nominations by majority vote (rather than by sixty votes). Republicans (at least when they are in the minority) call this “changing the rules by breaking the rules,” because Senate rules formally require a 2/3rds vote to break a filibuster of a measure to change Senate rules. The nuclear option would avoid the formal process of securing a 2/3rds vote to cut off debate; instead, the Senate would set a new precedent by simple majority vote to exempt nominations from the reach of Rule 22. If Democrats circumvent formal rules, Republicans would deem the move nuclear. Second, Reid’s potential gambit would be considered nuclear because of the anticipated GOP reaction: As Sen. Schumer argued in 2005 when the GOP tried to go nuclear over judges, minority party senators would “blow up every bridge in sight.” The nuclear option is so-called on account of the minority’s anticipated parliamentary reaction (which would ramp up obstruction on everything else).

A second detour notes simply that the exact procedural steps that would have to be taken to set a new precedent to exempt nominations from Rule 22 have not yet been precisely spelled out. Over the years, several scenarios have been floated that give us a general outline of how the Senate could reform its cloture rule by majority vote. But a CRS report written in the heat of the failed GOP effort to go nuclear in 2005 points to the complications and uncertainties entailed in using a reform-by-ruling strategy to empower simple majorities to cut off debate on nominations. My sense is that using a nuclear option to restrict the reach of Rule 22 might not be as straight forward as many assume.

That gets us to the place of threats in reform-by-ruling strategies. The coverage of Reid’s intentions last week emphasized the importance of Reid’s threat to Republicans: Dare to cross the line by filibustering three particular executive branch nominees, and Democrats will go nuclear. But for Reid’s threat to be effective in convincing GOP senators to back down on these nominees, Republicans have to deem Reid’s threat credible. Republicans know that Reid refused by go nuclear last winter (and previously in January 2009), not least because a set of longer-serving Democrats opposed the strategy earlier this year. It would be reasonable for the GOP today to question whether Reid has 51 Democrats willing to ban judicial and executive branch nomination filibusters. If Republicans doubt Reid’s ability to detonate a nuclear device, then the threat won’t be much help in getting the GOP to back down. Of course, if Republicans don’t block all three nominees, observers will likely interpret the GOP’s behavior as a rational response to Reid’s threat. Eric Schickler and Greg Wawro in Filibuster suggest that the absence of reform on such occasions demonstrates that the nuclear option can “tame the minority.” Reid’s threat would have done the trick.

As a potentially nuclear Senate summer approaches, I would keep handy an alternative interpretation. Reid isn’t the only actor with a threat: given Republicans’ aggressive use of Rule 22, Republicans can credibly threaten to retaliate procedurally if the Democrats go nuclear. And that might be a far more credible threat than Reid’s. We know from the report on Reid’s nuclear thinking that “senior Democratic Senators have privately expressed worry to the Majority Leader that revisiting the rules could imperil the immigration push, and have asked him to delay it until after immigration reform is done (or is killed).” That tidbit suggests that Democrats consider the GOP threat to retaliate as a near certainty. In other words, if Republicans decide not to block all three nominees and Democrats don’t go nuclear, we might reasonably conclude that the minority’s threat to retaliate was pivotal to the outcome. As Steve Smith, Tony Madonna and I argued some time ago, the nuclear option might be technically feasible but not necessarily politically feasible.

To be sure, it’s hard to arbitrate between these two competing mechanisms that might underlie Senate politics this summer. In either scenario—the majority tames the minority or the minority scares the bejeezus out of the majority—the same outcome ensues: Nothing. Still, I think it’s important to keep these alternative interpretations at hand as Democrats call up these and other nominations this spring. The Senate is a tough nut to crack, not least when challenges to supermajority rule are in play.

Authors

Sarah A. Binder

Publication: The Monkey Cage

Image Source: © Joshua Roberts / Reuters

Politics, Higher Education and Health Care in the Austerity Era

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 22, 2013
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Register for the Event
The A. Alfred Taubman Forum on Public Policy

Since the onset of the Great Recession, public discussion has centered on whether spending or austerity is the best path to economic recovery. As evidenced by the sequestration, recurring debt ceiling fights and the ongoing euro crisis, clear policy prescriptions to kickstart anemic economies remain elusive. Often lost in the public discussion surrounding government budgets, though, is consideration of austerity’s implications for national politics and how policy is enacted and implemented. How has the debate surrounding spending versus budget-cutting shaped the political conversation in the United States? What has been austerity’s impact on the policymaking process?

On May 22, the Governance Studies program at Brookings will host a half-day forum centered on the changed political and policy conversations in the austerity age. The fourth annual A. Alfred Taubman Forum on Public Policy will convene leaders from academia, the media, government, and business to explore the far-reaching implications of austerity reform and philosophy on the American political landscape and today’s most pressing policy challenges, specifically in the areas of higher education and health care.

After each panel, participants will take audience questions.

Audio

Politics, Higher Education and Health Care in the Austerity Era

Why Reform Medicare? The President's and Other Bipartisan Proposals to Reform Medicare

Alice M. Rivlin — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Mr. Chairman Members of the Committee:
Why reform Medicare? The main reason for reforming Medicare is not that the program is the principal driver of future federal spending increases, although it is. The main reason is not that Medicare beneficiaries could be receiving much better coordinated and more effective care, although they could. The most important reason is that Medicare is big enough to move the whole American health delivery system away from fee-for-service reimbursement, which rewards volume of services, toward new delivery structures, which reward quality and value. Medicare can lead a revolution in health care delivery that will give all Americans better health care at sustainable cost.

As this Subcommittee knows very well, health care in the United States is expensive and getting more so. Moreover, quality is uneven and much care is duplicative, wasteful, and uncoordinated. For many decades, however, reformers focused less on cost containment and quality improvement than on closing growing gaps in health insurance coverage. Now that near-universal coverage has been assured by the Affordable Care Act, attention should shift to improving quality and value of health care delivery for all and containing cost growth.

I recently had the privilege of co-leading (with former Senators Daschle, Domenici, and Frist) the Bipartisan Policy Center’s team that produced, A Bipartisan Rx for Patient-Centered Care and System-wide Cost Containment, in April. We reached consensus on a comprehensive package of reforms that span the entire health care system, with a particular focus on the Medicare program and federal health-related tax policy.

We believe that, if enacted together, these reforms will improve health care quality for patients and families and lower overall spending growth across the entire health care system. While budget saving were not our primary objective, we believe our Medicare reforms would achieve roughly $300 billion in net savings over ten years (2014-2023), and over the second decade (2024-2033) would result in another almost $1 trillion in budgetary savings to the Medicare program. These savings estimates are net of the cost of fixing the dysfunctional Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) physician payment formula.

Our bipartisan foursome were not mavericks working in isolation. The major themes of our report are featured in two other recent bipartisan reports—an update of the Simpson Bowles Commission recommendations and a report from the Bending the Curve project at the Engelberg Center at the Brookings Institution—and many aspects appear in the President’s budget proposals. These reports suggest a bipartisan convergence on the importance of using Medicare and tax reform to lead the transition of the health system away from fee-for-service reimbursement toward quality and value-based care.

Broadly the recommendations of the Bipartisan Policy Center report include:

Preserve the guaranteed health coverage promised in traditional Medicare while adding more choices and protections for beneficiaries, especially low-income beneficiaries.
Modernize the benefit package for Medicare.
- Cap beneficiary cost sharing at $5315 (catastrophic protection).
- Combine the deductible for Parts A and B ($500) and make coinsurance more predictable.
- Exempt physician visits from the deductible and preventive care from cost-sharing.
Limit Medicare supplemental coverage, which beneficiaries will have less incentive to buy if they have catastrophic. [Restrict first dollar coverage--Medigap must have deductible of $250 and can’t pay more than half coinsurance and deductibles—includes Tricare and FEHBP].
Protect low-income beneficiaries—help with all cost sharing (A,B,D) up to 150% FPL
Raise Part B premiums for higher income beneficiaries—[lower thresholds for increased premium to $60,000 for singles and $90,000 for couples and index.]
Create “Medicare Networks” an improved version of the Affordable Care Organization demonstrations in the ACA. Medicare Networks would be provider led and enrollment based and would enable better coordinated care. Beneficiaries would have incentives to join (lower premiums and lower cost-sharing in network) and providers would have incentives to join (higher updates and shared savings.) Reimbursement to Medicare Networks would increasingly reflect measures of quality and value.
Replace SGR with better designed structure and update with MEI. Costs offset some of the savings, but worth it to get rid of dysfunctional SGR.
Increase competition among health plans in MA by implementing a new competitive bidding structure where that would result in lower payments and helping beneficiaries navigate plan choice on a user-friendly website. Allow MA plans to share savings with beneficiaries. Improve risk adjustment in MA and supplement better risk adjustment with reinsurance. Well executed reform of MA could accomplish many of goals of premium support without establishing a whole new system.
Limit the tax-favored treatment of expensive health insurance products. Cap the exclusion of employer-paid benefits as a substitute for the “Cadillac Tax.”
Under our plan beneficiaries would have three choices: traditional FFS Medicare; Medicare Networks reimbursed for performance on measures of quality and value; and Medicare Advantage (MA). We would have a fall back cumulative limit on the increase in Medicare spending for each choice. Doubt would be necessary.

This will not be an easy set of reforms to enact or implement. It will require sustained effort at both the federal and state levels, as well as in the private sector. But there is no simple way to change our complex, fragmented health care system. We believe enactment and implementation of these reforms would not only improve care and save taxpayer dollars in Medicare; it would do the same for the whole health care delivery system.

Authors

Alice M. Rivlin

Publication: United States House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Health

Image Source: © Jim Young / Reuters

How Arab Public Opinion Is Reshaping the Middle East

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 21, 2013
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

The Arab awakening that began in 2011 is transforming the Middle East in ways that continue to surprise seasoned observers. As new political leaders and movements struggle for power and work to shape the region’s future, one thing is clear: public opinion is more consequential now than it has arguably ever been. How Arabs view themselves and the world around them will have enormous consequences for the region and the larger international community in the years ahead. How are changes in Arab public opinion shaping the changes occurring across the region? Have the U.S. and its allies done enough to understand and support the voices of Arabs seeking greater representation and opportunity?

On May 21, the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, as part of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, hosted the launch of The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2013), the latest book by Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami. Kim Ghattas, BBC’s State Department correspondent, engaged Dr. Telhami in a discussion of the book and the issues it raises. Martin Indyk, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks.

Welcome to Iran @ Saban

Suzanne Maloney — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:30:00 -0400

Welcome and khosh amadid!

Welcome to Iran @ Saban, a new blog featuring commentary and analysis on the array of issues related to Iran by scholars at the Brookings Institution. It takes only a quick scan of the headlines each day to appreciate the significance of Iran to American national interests and international security, and the variety and complexity of the issues and actors at stake. Through an intense focus on all things Iran, we hope to advance a better understanding of the internal dynamics of the Islamic Republic and promote effective international strategies for dealing with the challenges its policies pose.

We’ve timed our kick-off to coincide with the upcoming Iranian presidential election, in hopes of enriching the discussion that has already emerged around the ballot. As current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to leave office, Iran's internal power struggles will enter a new phase. From now through the vote on June 14^th and presumably well beyond, we’ll closely follow the twists and turns of Iran’s frequently unexpected electoral dynamics and consider what the future may bring for Iran. This discussion will delve into the major issues confronting Tehran today, especially the economic crisis and the impact of sanctions.

Although the electoral interplay will consume a great deal of attention in the next few weeks, the focus of the blog will extend well beyond the events of the election and Iran's domestic dramas. We will be tackling Iran’s approach to the region and the world, its relationship with established and emerging powers, and the strategies and tactics of various players, including the United States, toward Tehran. Inevitably, we’ll spend a lot of time examining the nuclear issue, starting with the prospects for revitalizing the stalled negotiations between Tehran and the international community and discussions around alternative approaches if dialogue fails to produce a diplomatic resolution of Iran's nuclear ambitions. However, the sense of urgency surrounding the nuclear issue has narrowed the American debate on Iran in recent years, problematically in my opinion. For that reason, watch the space for a robust discussion of the range of issues and threats related to Iran, including terrorism, human rights, the peace process and the Syrian civil war, the rise of new regional and global powers, and the impact of technology and changes in energy markets on Iranian politics and the policy options of the international community.

Let me also say a few words about what this blog won’t be: this won’t be a vehicle for lobbying for or against any particular point of view. This blog will be infused with opinions – various and variegated – but in keeping with the Brookings’ mission, our discussions here on the blog will remain grounded in the ideals of intellectual objectivity, rigorous policy-relevant analysis, and civil debate. In that respect, we hope to integrate some of our longer form scholarship into the blog, by featuring previews of forthcoming publications related to Iran and initating conversations surrounding our ongoing research projects.

I also want to underscore that this will not be a solo venture. At the outset, my name may recur disproportionately, as the person charged with wrangling the blog’s content and as one of the few scholars who has the luxury of obsessing almost exclusively about Iran. However, Iran invokes a diverse and thorny set of foreign policy issues and concerns, and many of my Brookings scholars are at the forefront of research and writing on areas relevant to the Iranian challenge. We’ll try to draw in experts on a range of different regions, including China, Europe, and India as well as the scholars in our Doha office, and functional areas of expertise, such as energy, intelligence, and nonproliferation, and the site will feature the work of a fantastic team of Brookings staff providing with research and media support. As visitors to this site will soon appreciate, the whole of Brookings' work on Iran is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to close this opening with an overture: we want to extend the debate on Iran beyond the walls of Brookings, and we encourage you to join the conversation via email to IranAtSaban@brookings.edu We’ll also be on Twitter (via, among others, @maloneysuzanne) and engaging through a variety of other media.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

What Should the Supreme Court Do About Affirmative Action?

Henry J. Aaron — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:42:00 -0400

Author's note: the following review of the book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students Its Intended to Help and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard H Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. was commissioned by Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic on September 10, 2012. It was submitted on January 30, 2013. No editorial comment having been received to date, I am posting it on the Brookings web site.

The Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education was a watershed event in several respects. It crowned a lengthy legal campaign to overthrow segregation in public schools. It rapidly widened into a multi-front campaign to assure that African Americans, other minorities, and women would not be excluded from any important aspect of American life. And it invoked social science in support of a fundamental reinterpretation of the Constitution.

Following Brown, it soon became clear that removing legal barriers was not enough to end the legacy of discrimination. Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech at Howard University stated bluntly that “We seek not just freedom of opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

To counter the effects of past discrimination, Johnson said, it is necessary not just to remove barriers but also to offer help. Some assistance was procedural. Selective colleges, universities, and graduate schools began for the first time to recruit minorities actively and to mentor them. Other assistance was substantive, such as making race, sex, or national origin a ‘plus factor’ for jobs, contracts, and college admission. Programs of this sort immediately raised knotty conundrums for law, ethics, and social science. Were they constitutional? Were they fair? Did they work?

The legal problem was obvious. The 14^th amendment states: “No State shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act flatly bars consideration of race in hiring and promotion decisions. Many universities are state chartered and supported. Private and public institutions of higher learning receive federal contracts. The constitution and civil rights laws make no exception for discrimination practiced to redress past injustices.

Ethical issues are also inescapable. Giving African Americans or Hispanics a special break does not increase the number of jobs or slots in university classes. Giving them an edge means pushing others back in the queue. Many of those ‘others’ never personally did anything wrong. If giving such edges to past or present victims of discrimination was accepted, how large an edge was it fair to give and for how long?

In its earliest phases, affirmative action clearly helped its intended beneficiaries. In 1933 when Harold Ickes and his two lieutenants, Clark Foreman and Robert Weaver—later the first black cabinet officer under president Johnson—required that blacks be hired to help build public housing, there could be little doubt that African Americans benefitted from their action. When Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Labor, George Shultz, commented about discrimination in the building industry: “We found a quota system; it was there; it was zero,” there could be no doubt that moving from zero would help those who had been excluded. The nation was so far from the goal of fair treatment of minorities and women that possible conflicts with other objectives seemed remote. But when selective colleges and universities began to admit minority students with comparatively weak academic credentials, many of whom got poor grades and dropped out at distressing rates, a new question arose...did race preferences, at least in higher education, really help those they were intended to help?

Research on the impact of preferential admissions in higher education and litigation over its constitutionality ran on parallel tracks.

The policy of boosting enrollments at selective universities and colleges from what came to be called ‘under-represented minorities’ developed rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s. It coincided with efforts by those institutions to become genuine meritocracies. Although prestigious undergraduate and graduate programs had always favored the academically talented, they also held many slots for the offspring of previous graduates and generous donors. Athletic or artistic skills helped too, of course. Discrimination in admissions was routine, primarily to hold down the numbers of bright kids with the “wrong” religion or cultural background.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, the weight attached to good grades and high test scores on entrance exams soared. Bragging rights came to those colleges whose entering classes had the highest scores on college entrance examinations. Some slots were still held for the progeny of previous graduates, the well-connected, the financially generous, and the artistically talented or athletically skilled. But academic standards for admission rose at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In simple terms, the ‘good’ schools, more than ever before, became academically excellent.

As far back as the 1970s concern grew that the policy of giving an edge to African Americans, Hispanics, and other members of under-represented minorities, however well-intentioned, might be doing more harm than good. Giving applicants from these groups an edge in admissions necessarily meant that, on the average, they came with weaker academic credentials than did whites. To be sure, selective schools offered matriculants big advantages—enriched environments, good connections, and, to those who graduated, a valued credential. On the other hand, students without adequate preparation might find the work just too difficult. As a result, they might even learn less than they would at less selective institutions. They might suffer stigma or be marked as second-raters or shamed as beneficiaries of unearned advantages, as many critics of affirmative action claim and some supporters fear. The result would be low-academic performance, high drop-out rates, wasted time and money, and, in extreme cases, blighted lives. The risk of these adverse effects would be larger the greater the gap between the student’s preparation and the norm at the institution they attended. This, in brief, was known as the mismatch hypothesis.

Determining whether a mismatch effect actually exists is extremely difficult. Even if admissions were race blind and even if there were no mismatch effect whatsoever, African Americans and Hispanics admitted to selective colleges and universities would predictably have lower grades and graduate a lower rates than do whites. This expectation is in no manner racist. It follows directly from two indisputable facts. African Americans and Hispanics applying to college have lower test scores and high-school grades on the average than do whites; and test scores and grades both are predictive of academic performance.

A hypothetical example illustrates how these two facts will produce different success rates for various groups. Imagine that colleges use an academic index for selecting students. The index can take on three values: 1 (high), 2 (medium), or 3 (low). Those with a higher academic index do better on the average in college than those with a lower score. Imagine also that out of every 100 whites, 35 score 1, and 35 score 2, and that out of every 100 African Americans and Hispanics 10 score 1 and 50 score 2. Selective schools admit only those who score 1 or 2, and they do so in a race-blind manner. Half of whites but only one-sixth of African Americans and Hispanics score 1. Those who score 1 do better in college than those who score 2. It follows that whites will do better in college on the average than will African Americans or Hispanics. This conclusion would not follow if tests and grades under-predicted performance of minorities relative to that of whites. But repeated studies have shown that tests and grades do not under-predict performance of African Americans and Hispanics.

The observation that African Americans and Hispanics who enroll at selective universities have lower qualifications for admission than do whites should therefore come as no surprise. Affirmative action adds to the difference between test scores and grades of entering students. But gaps would exist even if there were no affirmative action, and whether or not mismatch exists.

So, the challenge...how can one tell from the observation that African Americans and Hispanics do less well in college than do whites at selective schools whether this gap results from mechanical reasons of the sort just described or from harm inflicted through mismatch?

Simply comparing grades and graduation rates of various groups is not enough. The undeniable fact that students from under-represented minorities get poorer grades and drop out more often than white students do proves nothing about whether affirmative action helps or hurts its intended beneficiaries. One could go further and measure whether students at selective institutions do better or worse than do students with similar test scores and grades at other colleges and universities.

That is just what Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, respectively, did in their evocatively titled book, The Shape of the River. This study, published in 1998, drew on a rich data set developed with the support of the Mellon Foundation, which Bowen then headed. The survey reported on a large data set—College and Beyond—reporting the college experiences, graduation rates, and subsequent earnings of 93,660 students who graduated from thirty-four select universities and colleges in 1951, 1976, and 1989. Using statistical techniques that controlled for the expected influence of high-school grades, pre-college admission tests, race, and certain other characteristics, the authors found that African-American students who attended elite universities did as well as or better than African-American student who attended less elite institutions. The authors reported that they found no evidence to support the mismatch hypothesis.

The Bok-Bowen study was highly influential. The authors are highly respected. The survey was large. The information it contained was broad and detailed. Even so, the survey data were not ideally suited to test the effects of affirmative action. The earliest surveyed cohort attended college before affirmative action was much practiced and it is not clear to what extent that cohort drove the results. The data came mostly from highly selective institutions. Furthermore, because the data have not been freely available, few scholars could check the Bok-Bowen findings or do additional analysis. The importance of making data available so that other scholars may try to replicate results and identify errors hardly needs emphasis in light of recent controversies regarding the impact of government debt on economic growth.

Bowen and other co-authors revisited the question of how college affects students in 2009 with a new study, Crossing the Finish Line, based on an even larger survey. This study reported on the experiences of 124,522 freshmen who began college in 1999 at one of fifty-seven four-year public universities. These institutions were generally less selective than those included in the College and Beyond survey. Bowen reported some startling results. Regardless of the quality of the high schools that students attended, their grades predicted college performance far better than did standardized tests. The 2009 study also confirmed the major finding of The Shape of the River—that after controlling for high-school grades, test scores, race, and socio-economic status, students were more likely to graduate from more selective than from less selective universities. Once again, Bowen and his co-authors found no evidence to support the mismatch—what they called the ‘over-match’—hypothesis. Students are well-advised, they said, to enroll in the most selective institution that will accept them.

Critics questioned whether the Bok-Bowen studies provided support for affirmative action. Invoking considerations of fairness, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom noted that high graduation rates from elite institutions reflected not only the high qualifications of enrollees, but the high expectations for graduation at them. Besides, they emphasized, giving a race- or ethnicity-based edge to some necessarily involves a race- or ethnicity-based handicap for others. One of those groups with a race-based handicap, they noted, are Asians, whose academic credentials on the average outshine those of whites and who suffered much discrimination in American history.

Others argued that ordinary survey data are inherently inadequate to test the mismatch hypothesis. No survey can measure all educationally-relevant student characteristics. Specifically, surveys cannot measure aspirations or mental toughness, which are relevant to educational outcome and may be correlated with the schools students attend. Many social scientists argue that the best way, and sometimes the only adequate way, to test the effect of an intervention is the randomized experiment. Such methods are routine in medical and agricultural research, but they are not normally available to those testing the effects of affirmative action. Students cannot be randomly assigned to colleges. And, even if they could be, the very act would color the results. Normally, analysts are stuck with survey data. They can do no more than control statistically for every influence they can measure and hope that omitted factors are not very important.

From the earliest years of affirmative action, those denied admission to schools that gave minorities a race-based or ethnicity-based edge have challenged the practice in court. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in The Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that the constitution barred the university from setting aside a fixed number of slots in its medical school class for under-represented minorities. But, universities could use race as a ‘plus’ factor in pursuit of ‘diversity,’ which, the Court said, is a legitimate educational goal. To this day, however, the Court has not defined exactly what diversity is or how one would know if it had been achieved.

Breaking with Bakke, the federal Circuit Court serving Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi ruled in 1995 in Hopwood v. Texas that the University of Texas Law School could not use race as a factor in admissions. The case never got to the Supreme Court, however, because Texas dropped the challenged admissions practices.

Seven years later, the Supreme Court heard a pair of challenges to admission practices at the University of Michigan. For undergraduate admissions, Michigan used a point scale based on grades, test scores, and other factors. One hundred points assured admission. Under-represented minorities received 20 points automatically. In Gratz v. Bollinger, by a 5-4 margin, the Court reaffirmed that the pursuit of diversity is a legitimate goal, but it ruled that Michigan’s procedure was not ‘narrowly tailored,’ did not in general treat each applicant individually, resembled a quota system, which the Court had disallowed in Bakke, and was therefore unacceptable.

At the same time, also by a 5-4 vote, the Court upheld a race-conscious admission policy by the Michigan Law School. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the court said that the use of race was acceptable because the law school considered many factors and did so on an individual basis. The swing vote in both cases and author of the opinion of the Court was the now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has been succeeded by Justice Samuel Alito, widely thought to be less sympathetic than O’Connor to affirmative action.

The legal history is marked by chaotic disagreement. Not only has the court been divided, but the majorities have disagreed in the reasoning that has led to their judgments. For strong minded, independent jurists to reach a common position by different reasoning is not unusual. But the opinions reflect unresolvable internal conflicts. The Constitution guarantees equal protection, irrespective of race, national origin, sex, and age. Yet, American history is redolent of despicable violations of those principles. When, at last, Congress and private groups began to take steps to counter the legacy of discrimination, the highest court has been willing to curb, but not bar, these measures—at least, not yet.

While the idea that the best qualified people should get jobs, the best proposal should win the contract, and the best students should be admitted to selective colleges commands widespread support, few people adhere rigidly to the principles of meritocracy. They understand that in many cases no clear or reliable metrics exist for measuring merit. Furthermore, once one acknowledges that colleges and universities may legitimately consider factors other than test scores and grades in determining which applicants should be admitted, it is inevitable that some students refused admission will be better qualified on academic grounds than those admitted.

The point made in virtually every legal brief by a litigant complaining of discrimination because an African American or Hispanic with lower test scores or a weaker academic record was admitted reflects a profound confusion—such a result is inescapable once other criteria for admission are allowed to influence results. And because race, musical talent, athletic skills, and other non-academic characteristics predict academic performance less well than do grades and test scores, it is likely that those admitted because of such ‘non-academic’ qualifications will perform less well, on the average, than those admitted for purely academic reasons. Their grades are likely to be lower and they are likely to graduate at lower rates than those with stronger grades and test scores. Other influences, such as compensatory programs for the ill-prepared, easy grading (for athletes), or enrollment in ‘gut’ courses can partly or fully offset such tendencies. But the tendency is basic.

The issue of whether affirmative action in education is constitutional has returned to the Supreme Court docket. On February 21, 2012 the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Fisher v. Texas. Oral arguments took place on October 10, 2012. Outside interest in the case has been intense. The court received 90 ‘friend of the court’ (amicus curiae) briefs from interested parties, including social scientists.

Following the Hopwood decision, Texas adopted a simple policy of admitting applicants in the top 10 percent of Texas high-school graduating classes. Although the top-10-percent formula sacrifices some academic selectivity, it is a transparently reasonable admissions policy for a state-chartered institution dependent on state funds for part of its budget. It does not explicitly involve race or ethnic origin, but de facto residential segregation guarantees that this formula will result in the admission of more African Americans and Latinos than if admissions were based on test scores. Since its adoption, this formula has accounted for 60 to 80 percent of undergraduate admissions to the University of Texas. Following the Grutter decision, which sanctioned admission policies that considered race in a narrowly targeted, individual manner, Texas instituted what it called a “holistic” process to govern other admissions. The holistic admissions procedure uses both an academic index, based on test scores and grades, and a personal achievement index based on a wide range of other factors including two essays, family background, activities in the community and elsewhere, and race.

Ms. Fisher, a white Texas high school graduate, was in the 12^th percent of her class and therefore was not admitted on the 10 percent plan. Nor was she admitted through the alternative selection process. She was offered a place on a waiting list, which she refused. She challenged the constitutionality of the Texas admission policy, claiming that but for her race she would have been admitted and was thereby unconstitutionally denied equal protection under the law.

The briefs of the parties to the case focus on whether the use of race in the Texas formula does or does not qualify as ‘limited and individualized,’ as specified by Justice O’Connor in Grutter v. Bollinger. But the court may go further by limiting or overturning Grutter, and at least four justices are thought to be disposed to do so. Persuasive evidence that affirmative action harms those it is intended to help would buttress the ethical foundation for such a position. One of the amicus briefs, by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor, argues just that. Their book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, is a lengthy and rich argument in support of this position. So significant is this indictment of affirmative action that another amicus brief, by a veritable Who’s Who of empirical social scientists is devoted to rebutting the Sander/Taylor brief. Social scientists submitted several other amicus briefs, some in support of Ms. Fisher’s appeal, some opposed.

Mismatch extends and elaborates an indictment of affirmative action first presented by Sander in 2004 in a Stanford Law Review article. That article provoked intense controversy, personal invective, and allegations of data suppression. Mismatch recounts this controversy in score-settling detail and is, thus, also a personal memoir and an expose of intellectual politics in the academy, as well as a layman’s guide to social science research on a tricky subject. Co-author Stuart Taylor comes to this tale with the background of having written Until Proven Innocent, a chilling and devastating expose of the way a rogue—and subsequently disbarred—district attorney railroaded Duke lacrosse players after a stripper falsely accused them of rape, and tells how Duke faculty members and administrators rushed to condemn the players despite abundant warning signs of prosecutorial abuse.

Sander and Taylor do not argue that affirmative action is inherently harmful to its intended beneficiaries, but rather that it is pushed to a damaging extreme. To make their case, they lay out a theory of how affirmative action, as practiced by the most select universities and colleges, ramifies through much of higher education. A few top universities are able to attract most of the academically able African Americans and Hispanics. Although the academic credentials of these students, on the average, are not as strong as those of their white or Asian classmates, these African-Americans and Hispanic students are mostly able to handle the academic challenges they face at these top schools. Sander and Taylor argue that is why Bok and Bowen found that most of the minority students they surveyed graduate and do well professionally.

But that is just part of the story. The selective institutions, Sander and Taylor argue, so seriously deplete the limited pool of academically well-qualified minorities that lower tier schools, also trying to meet affirmative action goals, admit applicants with credentials so weak that these students do less well than they would at still less selective institutions. Mismatch can be inferred as well, Sander and Taylor argue, from the finding that a larger proportion of students with a given SAT score major in the difficult STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) at less-selective than at more selective schools.

The reasoning is straightforward. First-level courses in these fields that serve as pre-requisites for upper division study weed out students who are comparatively weak at the institutions they are attending. Because affirmative action allows minority students to attend colleges where their academic preparation is comparatively weak, such students are more likely to get weeded out than they would be had they attended less-selective colleges and universities, where their academic preparation would have been more competitive.

The strongest evidence for the mismatch hypothesis comes not from data on undergraduate admissions but from information on law school graduates. The American Bar Association compiled data on thousands of law school graduates from a wide range of law schools—the Bar Passage Study (BPS). Because student grades and class rank depend, in part, on the average academic strength of classmates, students with a given academic index are more likely to get better grades at lower ranked law schools than they would at higher ranked law schools. Furthermore, African American and Hispanic students covered in the BPS were the beneficiaries of sizeable race- and ethnicity-based admission preferences at most law schools.

Based on data from the BPS, Sander and Taylor report two findings that, they argue, suggest mismatch. First, African American and Hispanic law school graduates with similar academic index scores (based on undergraduate performance) to those of whites passed the bar at lower rates than did whites. But if one controlled for both academic index and law school grade point average, there was no significant difference in passage rates of African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites. The reason why relative class standing influences bar passage, they argue, is that instruction and grading are geared to the median student in each school. Students who are weaker than average at a given school will find it hard to keep up, will learn less than they would if instruction was geared to their level of preparation, and will therefore pass the bar exam at lower rates than they would had they attended a school better tailored to for their academic skills. This finding implies that law school students should not follow the advice from Bok and Bowen gave to undergraduates—go to the most selective school that will admit you—but should instead be very careful not to over-reach.

Could both Bok/Bowen and Sander/Taylor be correct? The curricula at professional and graduate schools are notoriously austere. The environment in law school is ruthlessly meritocratic to an extent true of few undergraduate programs. If the conditions between undergraduate and graduate schools and among undergraduate programs are sufficiently different, affirmative action might help in some cases and hurt in others.

An intense intellectual battle followed Sander’s 2004 article and continues to this day. One exchange illustrates how hard the issues are analytically and how difficult it is to reach consensus. Two members of the Yale Law School faculty, Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, noted that not all African Americans surveyed in the BPS accepted admission letters from the schools they had listed as their first choices. Some went to lower choice schools that were mostly less selective than the first choice schools. The students in the two groups were otherwise similar. If mismatch were a problem, they reasoned, students who went to first choice schools would be more likely to get low grades and less likely to pass the bar than those who went to less select schools. In an initial draft, Ayres and Brooks found no such differences and stated that the evidence provided no support for the mismatch hypothesis.

Sander reports that Ayres and Brooks shared their analysis with him and that he pointed out errors, which they then corrected. After the corrections were made, Sander and Taylor claim that the corrected results closely match what the mismatch hypothesis suggests—those students who did not go to their first-choice, relatively select law schools got better grades, graduated at a higher rate, and were more likely to pass the bar on their first try. But, they assert, Ayres and Brooks refused to modify the text of their initial draft. In addition, Ayres and Brooks are among the signers of the amicus brief by quantitative social scientists which is highly critical of the methods that Sander and Taylor use. This brief states flatly: “Sander’s research has major methodological flaws—misapplying basic principles of causal inference—that call into doubt his controversial conclusions about affirmative action....Sander’s research does not constitute credible evidence that affirmative action practices are harmful to minorities....”

Quite apart from the analytical case that Sander and Taylor make against affirmative action, Mismatch is an expose of politics and back-biting in the academy. It charges that those controlling what should be publicly available data refuse access to people who it is feared will come up with politically objectionable answers. It charges critics with refusals to admit demonstrable mistakes. Both Taylor’s earlier book on the Duke rape case and Mismatch report enough unreasoned and unreasonable behavior in the name of political correctness to make one gag. Most importantly, Mismatch charges universities and colleges with a stunning lack of candor regarding the extent of affirmative action and refusal to provide data with which analysts could evaluate its effects.

Although Mismatch indicts affirmative action in its current form, Sander and Taylor recommend that affirmative action be modified not ended. They note that minorities who are favored by affirmative action disproportionately come from favored socio-economic groups, children of professionals and others with higher education. They recommend that racial preferences be no larger than preferences based on financial need and socioeconomic status. The emergence of growing economic inequality heightens the appeal of class-based affirmative action. Precisely how such balancing of racial, socio-economic, and needs-based factors might be achieved is not explained in the book. Others have also urged class-based affirmative action as both fairer and politically more acceptable than race-based affirmative action—notably, Richard Kahlenberg who has taken that position for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, Sander and Taylor leave a key question unanswered—if current race-based affirmative action harms intended beneficiaries, why wouldn’t a mix of some race-based and some class-based affirmative action also do so?

Particularly troubling for a technically minded reader/reviewer is the absence from a book running to nearly 300 pages of any clear, technical presentation of the mismatch hypothesis. The authors say at the outset that in order to keep the book to a reasonable length, they are omitting ‘technical or elaborating material’ but that such details can be found at their website. At various other points in the book, readers are also advised that they can find further detail at the same web site. As I write this review and after personal contact with both authors, the website remains without such supporting material.

What conclusions should the Court and the public take from Mismatch and the cacophony of conflicting research on the effects of affirmative action? First, universities and colleges should provide qualified analysts access to data on admission practices. It is not credible that universities would suffer irreparable damage if their admission practices were publicized. Nor is it believable that minorities who benefit from racial preferences would wilt from the stigma if these practices were spelled out. The failure of colleges and universities to divulge data on the way affirmative action operates should not be tolerated. The best way to correct any over-use or misuse of affirmative action is not to ban it but to insist that its operation be illuminated with hard data and further analysis.

Second, on the major theme—the charge that affirmative action hurts its intended beneficiaries—I believe that judgment must still be withheld. Sander and Taylor present a powerful case that it does so in particular instances. But the character of college and university programs and their objectives is enormously varied. It is much more important to make sure that African Americans and Hispanics are well-represented among tomorrow’s public officials and business leaders and that they are well trained than it is to assure racial or ethnic diversity among tomorrow’s mathematicians and biomedical researchers. Meritocratic values have their place. So too do the values of inclusiveness. If there was ever a place where one size does not fit all, it is in the treatment of affirmative action within the academy.

Authors

Henry J. Aaron

Image Source: © Jose Luis Magaua / Reuters

Who Are Iran's Voters?

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:10:00 -0400

The list of candidates registered for the Iranian presidential election in June — at least until they are trimmed by the Guardian Council — offers Iranian voters a reasonable variety of philosophies from which to choose.

As usual, there is a mix of social and economic issues on voters’ minds, but differences between candidates in their approaches to solving Iran’s mounting economic problems matter most. Populists, led by president Ahmadinejad’s close associate Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, promise more redistribution. Pragmatists and reformers, led by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, argue for the revival of economic growth. Finally, an assortment of conservatives, led by politicians close to the Supreme Leader, such as former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, will take a middle course promising both growth and redistribution.

But who are the voters to whom these philosophies would appeal?

Since the last election in 2009, the voting-age population (18 years and older) has grown from 47 million to 55 million. (Age structure and employment data are calculations from the 2% sample of the 2011 census provided by the Statistical Center of Iran and are adjusted to reflect the 2013 age structure.) It has also aged slightly: The median voter is now 38 years old, three years older than in 2009. Voters under 30 (henceforth young voters), account for one-third of all voters, down from 37% in 2009. So, young voters are not as numerous as they were in 2009 when, in the aftermath of the highly contested vote that returned Ahmadinejad to office for a second term, they poured into the streets and created the Islamic Republic’s first serious political crisis. But, compared with 19% in the US, Iran's young voters are still quite a force to be reckoned with.

The shift to adult voters (aged 30-64), who comprise 57% of all voters, compared to 54% in 2009, though small, points to the direction in which Iranian politics may be moving in the future: away from social issues that concern youth and in the direction of economic issues that matter to older voters. In 2009, younger voters were energized by Mir Hossein Mousavi’s statement during a television debate that, if elected, he would stop the public chastity police. They seemed less concerned that his economic plan was much less specific about how he was going to help them find jobs.

Youth suffer from very high rates of joblessness, but their pain is often shifted to their parents. An astonishing 65% of young voters live with their parents, and are thus partly shielded from the harshest aspects of Iran’s failing economy.

Older voters are more concerned with economic issues because they work and are breadwinners for their families. Youth suffer from very high rates of joblessness, but their pain is often shifted to their parents. An astonishing 65% of young voters live with their parents, and are thus partly shielded from the harshest aspects of Iran’s failing economy. About 77% of adult males work, compared to 40% for young voters (11% of adult women work compared to only 6% of young women).

Social class will play a larger role in this election than any in the past, thanks in part to the populist policies of the Ahmadinejad administration. In 2011, the median voter lived in a family with about $11 per day of expenditures per person, which by common international standards classifies him or her as middle class. (Conversions to US dollars use a factor of 6,500 rials in 2011, which is higher than the World Bank estimate of 5,854 rials per USD; income and expenditure data use the Expenditure and Income Surveys of 2009 and 2011 collected by the Statistical Center of Iran.)

Poor voters (defined as living in families with less than $3 per day) accounted for only 2.1% of the voting age population. But rising inequality, especially at the very top, has created a much wider base of disgruntled voters who would like to see the government engage in more redistribution, not less, despite the fact that many in Iran now believe that Ahmadinejad-style redistribution has caused inflation and not improved their lot.

Since January 2011, President Ahmadinejad’s main populist program — cash instead of energy subsidies — has been depositing cash in individual bank accounts of nearly every Iranian every month. Survey evidence suggests that for people below the median income, trading cheap fuel for cash has been a net gain. The monthly payment amounted to $360 (in international dollars) for a family of four in 2011, which was about 50% of the monthly expenditures of people in the poorest 10% (now about half as much), 17% for those in the middle of the distribution, but only 5% for the richest decile. As a result of these and other transfers, the Gini index of income distribution fell by nearly 5 percentage points to 0.36 (my calculations from surveys of incomes and expenditures), its lowest level in the post-revolution period.

Improving the distribution of incomes is not the same thing as raising them. In the last two years, Iran’s economy has performed very badly, in part because of international sanctions, but also in large part because crude redistributive policies, such as unconditional cash transfers, are rarely good for economic growth.

Even if Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the candidate most closely associated with Ahmadinejad, is allowed to run, it is uncertain whether or not he will be able to rally the beneficiaries of the populist policies followed in the last eight years to make a good showing at the polls. Uncertain, too, is how long his reformist and conservative opponents can afford to ignore popular demands for redistribution or be able to undo the redistributive policies of the current administration if they win the election.

Authors

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

Publication: Al Monitor

Image Source: © Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

Will Obamacare Implementation Really Be a "Train Wreck"?

S. Lawrence Kocot — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, an architect and supporter of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), recently caught the Administration's attention when he voiced his concerns about the implementation of the health exchanges—the centerpiece of Obamacare now scheduled to go live on October 1—saying that he sees "a huge train wreck coming."

President Obama responded to concerns about implementation, emphasizing that he is 110 percent committed to getting implementation done right, but he also cautioned that there will be mistakes and hiccups.

While the Administration is certainly not going to highlight major problems at this point in the implementation cycle, there are a few key indicators to watch over the next few months to assess how well implementation is progressing:

1. Affordability. Very simply, can individual and small group purchasers of health insurance in the new marketplaces afford the likely cost? A recent report by the Society of Actuaries indicates that we can expect to see per member per month costs of plans in the individual markets increase by as much as 32% under the ACA -- with many states seeing increases even higher. The Administration and some advocates claim that the actuaries' report is misleading or just plain wrong, and that any cost increases will be covered by ACA's generous subsidies that will cushion the blow for most of those eligible for the benefits.

The Qualified Health Plan approval process is still in progress, so we won't know the full extent of the cost increases until later this summer. However, with projected insurance plan costs for some states now available, we can already see that there will be significant variation across the states on average costs in the non-group market. Vermont and Rhode Island are projecting favorable rates to consumers; Washington is mixed depending upon enrollee characteristics; and Maryland costs are projected to rise by 25% on average next year - but with healthy young men seeing their insurance costs rise as much as 150%- contrary to the ACA's goals of providing affordable insurance.

If the Society of Actuaries is right, we can expect that the cost of this new health insurance may be hard to swallow for some consumers who will not be eligible for subsidies - some 1 million persons in 2014, according to CBO. And for the other 6 million expected enrollees eligible for subsidies in 2014, the cost to the federal government could be more than the projected $35 billion. If overall plan and subsidy costs are much higher than anticipated, legitimate questions may be raised about the sustainability of the program.

2. Availability. Even after we know more about the "rate shock" that is predicted to come later this summer, the question then becomes: will state marketplaces be operational by October? This gets to the heart of the "train wreck" comment, as the law requires that subsidies be administered through enrollment in the marketplaces. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have agreed to run their own state marketplaces, while the remainder have surrendered many of the operational decisions or have deferred completely to the federal government to run theirs.

Even under the best of circumstances, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) would have difficulty pulling off the simultaneous operational roll-out of more than 30 federally facilitated/partnership marketplace exchanges (FFEs) at the same time. In order for the FFEs to work as planned, CMS needs a willing state partner that is committed to making it work through precise coordination of technology and business rules, which requires extensive operational planning and resource allocation, as well as close collaboration and constant communication.

Let's face it: not all partners in the states are even willing, much less committed, to providing the time and resources to make a federal marketplace successful in their state. What Baucus is hearing about the FFE progress in Montana is consistent with what many FFE states are reporting -- many of these FFEs are not ready yet and time is running out to get them there.

So what about the 17 state-run marketplaces? They have been given over $3.5 billion in federal grants since 2010 to be ready to enroll consumers in the new insurance benefits on October 1, 2013. While some of these states are clearly ahead of the pack in terms of readiness, despite their best intentions, it is likely that not all state-run marketplaces will be fully operational by the deadline. CMS may have to decide if and when to take responsibility for some of them, which could be viewed by opponents as an early admission of failure.

To be fair, establishing marketplaces in 50 states and D.C. is an ambitious undertaking. With unprecedented cooperation required across multiple federal agencies, states, and quasi-state bodies and agencies coordinating with state insurance commissions and plans, the requirements and deadlines for effective implementation are virtually impossible. Additionally, new data systems that have never been fully tested with live data can't be expected to perform without technical glitches and a period of correction.

3. Outreach. As has been reported, CMS did not get the nearly $1 billion they said they need for outreach and implementation of the marketplaces. While this seems like a lot of money, it is not nearly enough to accomplish the task, especially given the difficulties CMS will have with some of the consumers they are trying to enroll - low-income, less healthy, and "young invincible" consumers, many of whom have not had insurance before. As polls have shown, 78% of subsidy eligible Americans do not know this benefit will be available. Like all marketplace applicants, they will need to fill out a multi-page form and will need help to get educated about subsidies to make the insurance affordable. Experience has shown that the hardest benefits to sell are the ones that cost even a little to those who have the least. This explains why Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been desperately trying to rally insurers and private organizations such as Enroll America to step up to supplement federal enrollment efforts; the private assistance will help, but it is not likely to be enough.

So, is this really the train wreck Senator Baucus sees? It probably depends on what type of railroad one was expecting. The implementation of Medicare Part D tells us that there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong with exchange implementation. No implementation is without challenges and this one will be particularly rough given the size and scope.

At the end of the day, however, the measure of implementation success is probably not the expense of the benefit nor whether technology works as intended; technical problems can eventually be fixed and in the short term, manual processes can hide a lot of sins. Rather, the real measure of success is how many people actually enroll in this new benefit and get the subsidy for which they qualify. If CMS can stay focused on these measures, the light at the end of the implementation tunnel may be much brighter than the light on the political train that continues to barrel down the tracks in their direction.

Authors

S. Lawrence Kocot

Publication: Real Clear Markets

Image Source: © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

Implementing the Affordable Care Act: Organizational and Political Challenges

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 20, 2013
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

This program aired live on CSPAN.org »

The Affordable Care Act is the single biggest domestic policy accomplishment of the Obama administration, but most Americans have yet to feel its impact, since many of the most far-reaching provisions do not take effect until 2014. Although the Supreme Court upheld the law, it continues to face political opposition and attempts to slow down its full implementation.

On May 20, the Management and Leadership Initiative at Brookings hosted a forum on the organizational challenges of implementing the Affordable Care Act in a difficult political environment. A panel of experts discussed obstacles such as building the state exchanges, expanding Medicaid, the role of the IRS, enforcing the individual mandate, the reaction from the small business community and the effect on premium prices.

Video

Audio

Implementing the Affordable Care Act: Organizational and Political Challenges

The Week After Pakistan's General Election

Madiha Afzal — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:07:00 -0400

The week after May 11, all Pakistanis can stand tall and be proud of what they have accomplished. We have shown that we are among the bravest citizens of any country in the world, participating in massive rallies leading up to the election, and turning out to vote on election day in record numbers, despite the Taliban threats and violence. We were also decisive, handing the PML-N a landslide victory, yielding the PPP a massive blow and giving third-party status to the PTI.

While a small number of results may turn out to be affected by vote rigging and irregularities, these election results truly reflect the voice of the Pakistani people. My research using election results and development funds data from the 1990s shows that Pakistani voters are not irrational: they will vote for the candidate or party, who provides them the most benefits, and against those they see as having wronged them. For its resounding victory, the PML-N deserves nothing but congratulations, genuine goodwill and support for tackling the monumental tasks it faces. Nawaz Sharif has shown maturity in his last five years in the opposition and exudes determination going forward. These characteristics will serve him well in office.

Imran Khan deserves accolades for energising Pakistan’s vocal urban youth, as well as many older, educated, and previously politically unengaged urbanites in turning out to vote. As such, the increase in voter turnout to around 60 per cent must, at least, partly be attributed to his efforts. The PTI is now a formidable third party in Pakistan, fundamentally changing the structure of the Pakistani party system and democracy as we know it. According to my calculations based on data from the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) website (as of May 16), of Punjab’s 138 National Assembly constituencies where the PTI was not the winner (it won eight National Assembly seats in Punjab) and where results were not withheld, the second runner-up candidate belonged to the PTI in 48 constituencies. That is an impressive achievement, one which the PTI and Mr Khan must be very proud of. It demonstrates that the PTI has made considerable inroads in Punjab.

The passion of Mr Khan’s followers in documenting and protesting vote-rigging, ballot stuffing and other illegal activities at polling stations over the last week also deserves commendation and heralds the arrival of a Naya Pakistan, one in which citizens speak up when they are wronged, a Pakistan which demands fairness and justice.

The passion of Mr Khan’s followers in documenting and protesting vote-rigging, ballot stuffing and other illegal activities at polling stations over the last week also deserves commendation and heralds the arrival of a Naya Pakistan, one in which citizens speak up when they are wronged, a Pakistan which demands fairness and justice. Mr Khan’s appeal to the ECP to look into vote-rigging in 25 constituencies should be taken very seriously, whether it changes the results of the election in his favour or not. Regardless of whether ballot-stuffing happened in four constituencies or 40, it is illegal, and a truly fair electoral system should tolerate no instance of it.

But let’s talk for a minute about where the PTI did very well — Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Mr Khan’s party won 17 out of its 27 National Assembly seats there, and a plurality in the K-P provincial assembly, winning 35 seats out of 99. Mr Khan’s supporters on social media have hailed the Pashtuns as visionaries, as being more progressive than the rest of Pakistan. Photographs of a modern Peshawar skyline in 2018 as the outcome of five years of a provincial PTI government are doing the rounds. But are the Pashtuns really the idealists they are being made out to be, the path-breakers to a Naya Pakistan? What about the role of the Taliban in all this?

The truth is a lot less romantic than the PTI stalwarts would proclaim. We know that the PTI is the only party that was able to effectively campaign in K-P given the Taliban’s brutal and unrelenting assault on the ANP. True, the ANP faced a disadvantage as the incumbent provincial government, which supervised over a terrible five years in K-P. Nevertheless, it is astounding that it got no sympathy for the bullets and the bombs it took for Pakistani democracy. Not from the voters of K-P, and not from the active PTI protesters who were out at Teen Talwar and Lalik Chowk protesting alleged election fraud in Karachi and Lahore. What do these newly mobilised youth think of the fact that the Taliban essentially handed the K-P to the PTI?

Regionalism and provincialism, already reflected in the election results, have become even more pronounced in this past week as blame is assigned for not embracing Mr Khan’s vision, and class fissures have opened up. The Punjabis are being maligned by PTI supporters outside Punjab for being misguided, and rural Punjabis denigrated by urban Punjabis for being irrational. No one is thinking of Balochistan at all, where turnout was dismal amid security concerns. The truth is that the PTI energised and engaged a minority, the urban young, who did not, in the end, garner it significant voting power in parliament.

This is not to discount by any means the notable performance of the PTI candidates as runners-up in Punjab’s constituencies. But the irony is that those who got the PTI over the finish line are the residents of K-P, a very different segment from the elite Lahore and Karachi base, who consider themselves the PTI’s face. In the end, the illusion generated by massive rallies in Lahore and Islamabad belied the truth that the PTI represented but a minority of Pakistan’s population. Mr Khan led an extraordinary campaign, and over the next five years, he can make significant inroads where he does not yet have a base: in rural Punjab and in Sindh and Balochistan.

Authors

Madiha Afzal

Publication: Tribune

The Affordable Care Act: From Hiccups to Repeal

Elaine Kamarck — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:34:00 -0400

Note: On Monday, May 20, Elaine Kamarck, director of the Management and Leadership Initiative at Brookings, will moderate a public forum on "Implementing the Affordable Care Act: Organizational and Political Challenges."

It's been a long time since the federal government had to implement a large, new, federal program. Ten years ago we saw the implementation of Medicare Part D and the creation of a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. In each instance there were predictions of disaster and substantial growing pains. In the case of Medicare Part D implementation exceeded expectations and costs have not been nearly as high as feared. In the case of DHS, implementation was bumpier, nonetheless, ten years later both operate more or less smoothly and, in retrospect, the crisis now seems overblown.

This year, the Obama administration needs to finalize implementation of the Affordable Care Act—a historic piece of legislation and the most significant domestic policy achievement of the Obama administration to date. And the question of how it goes is front and center. Even the president has admitted that there will be “hiccups” along the way. Compared to earlier pieces of health care legislation, the ACA is incredibly complex, involving activity by fifty states, the jurisdiction of fifty state insurance regulators and changes in the entire health care industry. Added to the inherent complexity of the bill is the fact that it had no Republican support and is still adamantly opposed by the Republican party and by half of all those polled.

So the question is: how bad will it be? Imagine a continuum that goes from “hiccup” on one end to repeal on the other end. With plenty of points in the middle. What would that look like?

The hiccup scenario is the most optimistic. Hiccups are more or less normal. If the implementation is successful, the exchanges will be up and running. There will be glitches. Some people who qualify won’t get their subsidies; some who don’t will. The number of companies on the exchanges won’t be as big as hoped for but will grow. Premiums for health care will rise only modestly and the enhanced services in the new health care plans will make most people okay with the price increase.

The delay scenario is not really good nor is it fatal. A less successful outcome is one where the feds and states find they have to pull back from key provisions in the bill at least for a while. There may be delays in opening exchanges which would necessitate delays in enforcing the mandate that everyone buy insurance. The federal hub may not be able to interface with statewide data and eligibility could become a lengthy bureaucratic process. HHS might adopt a generous waiver policy while states work out their systems. Premiums may rise, leading to complaints from the public but no substantial drops in insurance buying.

The repeal scenario is fatal. Obviously Republicans, especially in the House, are rooting for this one. In fact they seem to like taking the repeal vote so much that they’ve done it 37 times in the past three years. So the question is: what would it take to move support for repeal beyond the Republican base? In 1989 Congress repealed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act a short sixteen months after it was passed. Why? It increased costs to seniors and offered them things that they didn’t want. In the context of ACA the repeal scenario is feasible if premium prices rise so high that people who don’t qualify for subsidies (there are more of them than those who do) decide that they really don’t want the enhanced packages envisioned in the law and then get really mad and let their representatives know it.

Where will we end up? Stay tuned.

Authors

Elaine Kamarck

Image Source: © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Iran’s Presidential Election Puts Populism to the Test

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:25:00 -0400

Economic issues are paramount on the minds of Iranian voters as they ponder the long list of candidates registered for president: who among them is likely to survive the vetting by the Guardian Council, and, of those, who offers the best plan to get Iran’s economy out of the rut it has been in for the last several years?

Since the last election in 2009, the economy has stopped growing, more people are unemployed, prices have skyrocketed, and the currency has lost more than half of its value. Not all of these are the fault of outgoing President Ahmadinejad — sanctions have tightened considerably since he started his second term in 2009. But for the last several months the economic debate in Iran has been dominated by both his conservative and reformist critics who charge that his populist policies have brought economic ruin.

Three large programs define this populist legacy of redistribution. The first was a large $40 billion lending program for small enterprises, known as the “quick-returns projects”, which started in 2006 and was already widely considered a colossal failure before the 2009 election. The 2011 census revealed zero net jobs added to the economy since the program’s inception. Meanwhile, the public banks that were forced to lend to these projects have been left with huge unpaid loans. This large expansion of credit that failed to bring much additional output spurred the inflationary spiral that would later define the Ahmadinejad presidency.

The low-cost housing scheme, known as Maskan Mehr, also turned out to be highly inflationary because it relied on public lending to low-income people, forcing the banks to increase their borrowing from the Central Bank by about $40 billion and adding even more to liquidity.

The third, and most controversial, is the subsidy reform program, which redistributed some $70 billion worth of energy subsidies — most of which benefited people in middle- and upper-income groups — more equitably by replacing them with cash transfers. It also proved inflationary because the amount of cash distributed exceeded the cost of the energy subsidies that had been removed by an estimated $15 billion per year. The last two programs are still ongoing and have come under sharp attack, from both reformists and conservatives.

There seems to be a widespread perception among Iranian voters that Mr. Ahmadinejad has failed to deliver on his promise, first made in the 2005 elections, to “bring the oil money to the dinner table.” But this does not mean that the public is ready to give up on redistribution. If there is a program that promises them what they are looking for – redistribution without inflation – they will support it. But such a program is not currently to be found among the plans of any of the declared candidates.

Mr. Rafsanjani’s dramatic entrance into the election fray last Saturday is in part motivated by the hope that after eight years of redistributive policies, a majority of voters are now ready to view the type of pro-growth and pro-market policies that he spearheaded as president from 1989 to 1997 with more sympathy. He has certainly already won the support of the left-leaning reformers who, ironically, heavily criticized his structural-adjustment policies then.

Mr. Mashai’s equally dramatic registration on Saturday (with President Ahmadinejad at his side) is to convince voters that with more time populists will deliver on their promises. They should be assured of sizeable support from lower-income people, especially those who have benefited from his cash transfers.

The subsidy reform has been putting 450,000 rials per person per month in individual bank accounts since January 2011. While the value of this transfer has declined due to inflation – when it started it was worth about $45 but is now worth less than half as much — it amounted to about 50% of the per capita expenditures of the poorest 10% of the population in 2011. With unemployment at record levels, they would find themselves in extreme poverty if this transfer is substantially reduced or eliminated. As much as half of the country’s total population are net beneficiaries of the cash transfer program because the energy subsidies they replaced were highly regressive.

Mr. Rafsanjani’s put-down of cash transfers in 2008 as “fostering beggars” is unlikely to endear him to the poor and the jobless. Convincing them that they would do better with real economic growth makes economic sense but will be a hard sell politically to this group. He may not need them, however, because the middle- and upper-income classes for whom the cash transfer matters little — for the top decile, it makes up only 5% of their expenditures — account for some 40% of the electorate.

Candidates from conservative factions, known as “Principlists”, have so far gotten away with simply pointing out what they are against – inflation, unemployment, and bad implementation of good policies by the current administration. They have been careful to stress their commitment to continue the two remaining programs – subsidy reform and low-cost housing – but manage them better.

But the arrival of Mssrs. Rafsanjani and Mashai on the electoral scene will force them to define more precisely how they plan to bring about economic growth while continuing the most important policies of the Ahmadinejad administration. If the Guardian Council, which has the final say on who can run, allows this election to become a three-way race between populist, pro-growth, and Principlist philosophies, the conservative candidates will have to say more clearly what they are for, not just what they are against. Without it, they are likely to find themselves squeezed between the two better-defined alternatives.

Authors

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

Publication: Lobe Log

Image Source: © Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

Federal Tax Reform? Don't Bet The Rent Money On It

Bill Frenzel — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:52:00 -0400

In some years there are no budgets. This year we have been presented with thre dueling budgets, one from each house and one from the president. Neither house has picked conferees, and neither has any current inclination to do so. Each prefers to glare at the other until the next election day.

The “Grand Bargain” on the Federal budget this year is still possible, but it seems less and less likely. The prospect is for another year of small deals, recurring crises, and several continuing resolutions.

As hopes for the big fiscal fix recede, tax reform moves to center stage. Ideally, tax reform ought to be a part of a larger budget agreement. But, with that agreement now slipping out of reach for 2013, tax reform seems to some observers to be a more promising suspect.

Tax reform appeals to both parties for different reasons. Democrats need it for new spending to stimulate growth. Republicans want to use it for lowering tax rates for the same reason. Those differences may be irreconcilable, but members of Congress seem to want to give tax reform a try.

Perhaps the best reason for tax reform optimism lies in the fact that the chairmen of both tax-writing committees really want to do it. Dave Camp, chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, is now serving his last term as chair under caucus rules. Max Baucus, Camp’s Senate Finance Committee counterpart, is in a similar position. He is retiring from Congress after this term.

Both of these leaders are strongly motivated to produce a tax bill before they slide into history. Both are able veterans who know the tax code. They meet regularly. Both have held hearings on tax reform, and have given it much study over the past two years. In addition, Camp has the blessing of the House Republican leadership including Speaker Boehner, who has saved the precious number, HR 1, for a tax reform bill.

Some business interests, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, want to see reform of the tax code, too. Many of them see advantages in potentially lower rates, and in reform of U.S. taxation of their foreign income. American business is by no means unified on this subject, but there clearly is plenty of interest.

There is, however, another side to the tax reform story. Historically, it is a rare event. The last successful effort was in 1986. Before that one has to backtrack to 1958 to identify a major tax reform enactment. In the 1986 version, both Congressional parties, (with Democrats in the majority) and the President, Ronald Reagan, strongly supported it. Even so, the process took two years. Nobody believes that the 1986 political consensus can be duplicated today.

In 1986, the American people polled strongly in favor of tax reform. Nowadays, they are not so sure. They saw the 1986 act substantially altered by amendment in the years immediately thereafter. Today, the public is not sure that tax reform will help them. And, even if it does help, they are pretty sure it will soon be amended beyond recognition. Trust in the government has all but faded away in the last three decades.

In the end, the biggest hurdle for tax reform will be to overcome the opposition of interests who are unwilling to part with their tax preferences peaceably. Unsurprisingly, many individuals and corporations just love their tax preferences. Some of them would be worse off with a system that abolished those preferences even if their basic tax rates were lowered.

This group is sophisticated. It knows how to make strategic political contributions, and it knows how to lobby successfully. It also knows how to maneuver in the current political environment where polarization is the rule, and in which members of Congress do not often trust one another. For these interests, the conditions on the playing field are just about perfect for defending their preferences.

Just as the country needs a Grand Bargain, it also needs tax reform. It would be wonderful if tax reform could be achieved this year. The two chairmen and many members will give the good old college try. But, if a budget compromise is not possible, it also seems unlikely that a good tax reform bill can be enacted. Cheer for tax reform; pray for it; just don’t bet the rent money on it.

Authors

Bill Frenzel

Publication: Forbes

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s Comeback Kid

Bruce Riedel — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:12:00 -0400

Nawaz Sharif is the comeback kid of Pakistani politics. With his party’s electoral victory, he is poised to become prime minister for an unprecedented third time. The Sharif odyssey has been remarkable—but now we will see if he can convert his victory into a new beginning for his deeply troubled country and our own tortured relations with it.

The 63-year-old Nawaz Sharif was born into money as the scion of a very wealthy family in Lahore. He entered politics to protect the family’s industry from nationalization. In the 1980s he became a protégé of Pakistan’s third military dictator, Zia ul Huq, and became the dominant politician in the country’s richest and most populous province, the Punjab. In 1990 Sharif was elected prime minister after his great rival, Benazir Bhutto, was booted out by the military.

I first got to know Sharif when I was President George Bush’s Director for South Asia and Persian Gulf Affairs in the White House in the early 1990s. Sharif was America’s partner in trying to wind down the decade-old war in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed communist government that had outlived the defeat of the Soviet 40th Red Army in 1988, and was still clinging to power in Kabul. Unfortunately, when the communist government finally did collapse in 1992, it only ushered in a vicious civil war among the victorious mujahedin. Pakistan was left to deal with the consequences on its own as America abandoned Afghanistan to its fate. And Sharif lost power in 1993 to Benazir Bhutto.

He was elected back to a second term as prime minister in 1997. A year later he tested Pakistan’s nuclear weapons after India tested its first. As President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Near East and South Asia Affairs, I tried to persuade Sharif not to follow India’s path, but to no avail. In 1999 Sharif’s hand-picked Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf, exploded a détente Sharif had arranged with India by starting a war in Kashmir. Normally very shy, Sharif invited himself to the White House on July 4, 1999, to find a way out, and wisely agreed to Clinton’s demand that Pakistan unilaterally abandon the war Musharraf had orchestrated. Sharif’s decision averted a wider—and very possibly nuclear—war.

Sharif fired Musharraf on October 12, 1999, while the general was visiting Sri Lanka. The general refused to step down and instead orchestrated a coup and arrested Sharif. A military court was summoned to try Sharif for treason. Only in Pakistan could a legitimately-elected prime minister be labeled a traitor for firing the country’s top general—a general who Sharif had selected for the job in the first place. Many expected Musharraf to have Sharif executed, just as Zia ul Huq had executed Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Bhutto.

Clinton tasked me with saving Sharif’s life. The president believed Sharif did not deserve death, and that it would be a disaster for Pakistan to execute another elected leader after a military coup. I spent a great deal of time arguing for clemency with the Pakistani ambassador in Washington. The ambassador was sympathetic to the argument—but I needed more help. The Saudi ambassador to Washington at the time, Prince Bandar, provided the heavy lifting.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also did not want a repeat of the Zia-Zulfi nightmare. Then Crown Prince Abdallah used the Kingdom’s considerable influence in Pakistan to save Sharif. Saudi Arabia is Pakistan’s closest ally, and has given more financial aid to Pakistan than to any other country in the world. Abdallah asked Musharraf to let Sharif go into exile in Saudi Arabia. As Musharraf later wrote in his memoirs, it was an offer he could not refuse. After 14 months in prison, Sharif went into exile in the Kingdom in December 2000. Few expected him to ever return home.

Now the tables have turned. Sharif has won a massive electoral victory and his long time tormentor, Musharraf, is under arrest in Pakistan after returning from his own exile to run in the elections. Musharraf was ousted by popular pressure in 2008, became a billionaire in exile in London, and then foolishly decided he was Pakistan’s savior this winter and decided to go home to be swept back into power by the people. He miscalculated badly. No one in Pakistan wanted the self-appointed savior, and he is now under house arrest. He faces a number of charges and could be tried for the coup he orchestrated against Sharif. The irony is rich.

But Sharif faces a real challenge over what to do with Musharraf. The general has few supporters even in the army, but the officer corps will be very uncomfortable with the prospect of one of its own serving prison time, or worse. Since many of the senior commanders in the army today, including Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, are former Musharraf protégés who rose with him to power, the question of what to do with Musharraf now is a dangerous challenge. The courts will decide his fate but the next prime minister’s voice will matter.

Deciding how to handle the Musharraf affair is only one of Sharif’s huge challenges. The country is under siege by some of the extremists it nurtured during the wars in Afghanistan. Some 45,000 Pakistanis have died in extremist terrorism since 2001, and violence wracked the election. Sharif has urged a political process to try to end the terror, and has been widely accused of being too soft on the Pakistani Taliban. He has long coddled Pakistan’s most dangerous terrorist group, Lashkar e Tayyiba, which carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008 and which has its headquarters in Sharif’s home city of Lahore. LeT retains very close links to the army and the intelligence service, the ISI.

Nonetheless, Sharif has also promised to turn a page in Pakistan’s relations with India and has invited Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to his inauguration. As an industrialist billionaire, Sharif knows the Pakistani economy desperately needs more trade and investment from its far more vibrant Indian neighbor. Pakistan’s economy is in shambles, and half the people in the country are under 15 with little hope for a decent education or a good job. Sharif is not obsessed with rivalry with India like his generals; his vision of Pakistan is more about building highways and mass transit than an arms race Pakistan cannot win. In the campaign, he promised that he will build a fast bullet train line linking the port city of Karachi to the northern city of Peshawar. When last in the prime minister’s office, he built a modern highway to link Lahore to Islamabad.

America’s relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low, yet Washington provides huge quantities of military and economic aid to Pakistan: over $25 billion since 2001. We are on opposite sides of the war in Afghanistan where Pakistan and the ISI are the Afghan Taliban’s key ally, even as we depend on Pakistan for the vital supply line that allows us to withdraw our heavy equipment from Afghanistan as we transition out of the country by 2014. Inside Pakistan, our drones fly daily missions looking for al Qaeda— missions Sharif promised to try to halt during the campaign. He did not endorse his rival Imran Khan’s call to shoot down American drones (probably with American-supplied F-16s) but he will face much popular demand to end the drone war.

Two presidents, Bush and Clinton, worked with Sharif with mixed results during his two previous tours as prime minister. Now that the comeback kid of Pakistani politics is on the verge of his third time in the top office, President Barack Obama will need to partner with Sharif. It’s an opportunity Obama needs to make a success.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The Daily Beast

And They’re Off: The Campaign for a New Iranian President Has Begun

Suzanne Maloney — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:26:00 -0400

The race to replace Iran’s deeply polarizing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, officially opened last week with the registration of prospective candidates, and already the campaign promises an utterly fascinating ride through the unpredictable politics of the Islamic Republic. The shock and awe surrounding the last-minute decision by Iran’s iconic former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to throw his hat into yet another race has only been topped for drama by the latest antics of the current incumbent aimed apparently at elevating a controversial protégé to succeed him. At least at the outset, these sensational developments have overshadowed the emerging shape of the real race among an array of regime functionaries, most notably nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.

With 686 would-be candidates and an array of insidious regime mechanisms for influencing the outcome, it is literally impossible to predict today who the ultimate contenders will be, much less who will win the race. However, what is clear is that Iran’s presidential election represents the opening salvo in another historic turning point in the volatile evolution of the revolutionary theocracy.

The application period is a deliberately chaotic process, designed to justify the pretense behind the clerical vetting process and bolster the credibility of the nominees who are ultimately tapped by Iran’s Guardians’ Council, a 12-member unelected clerical oversight body. There is also a keen dimension of political theater, as the prospective candidates seek to gauge their relative prospects and the leadership endeavors to maintain an uneasy balance between galvanizing popular interest in the campaign and inciting the kind of electoral exuberance that has generated instability in the past. Over the course of the next 10 days, the field will be narrowed from several hundred to a mere handful who are assessed to meet the constitutional standards for the office.

This time around, the chaos has been intensified by the lingering memories of the upheaval that ensued in 2009, when an implausibly rapid vote-count and wide margin in favor of Ahmadinejad’s reelection instigated the largest and most sustained protests in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. The ensuing crackdown left Iran’s burgeoning reform movement estranged, imprisoned or scurrying into exile. Predictably, however, no sooner had the conservative wing of the Iranian political spectrum achieved uncontested dominance than deep fissures emerged within them. For the past two years, frictions among Iranian hard-liners have been directed, full bore, at Ahmadinejad himself, which greatly heightens the significance of the current contest to succeed him.

Cue Ahmadinejad’s first electoral adversary, Rafsanjani, whose entrance has sparked an intense debate about his motivations as well as about the competition to come. In a prospective field comprised mostly of second-tier Iranian political figures, mostly former ministers and parliamentarians, he is vastly better known and boasts a political machinery that spans factions and decades. For many within Iran’s dispirited reformist and opposition ranks, the former president offers their best hope of political redemption and national salvation, a hint of their own marginalization given their past differences with him. Rafsanjani’s reputation for pragmatism is well-earned; he was tasked by Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founder, with ending the futile war with Iraq and later endeavored against stiff opposition to rehabilitate the country and reform its economy. He has carefully navigated fidelity to the system while critiquing both Ahmadinejad and the 2009 election, and his return to the presidency would likely revive now-dormant diplomatic fantasies in Europe and perhaps even Washington.

However, the former president faces powerful impediments that had persuaded many observers that his recent hints about the race were just a tease. Mostly notable is his age – almost 79 – which raises questions of capacity but also may undermine his appeal in a country with a disproportionately young population. More problematic is the unfortunate reality that he appears to have a more effusive constituency in the Western media than in Iran. Among the Iranian establishment, Rafsanjani is widely perceived as wildly corrupt and ideologically untrustworthy, and the population at large rejected his bid for a parliamentary seat in 2000 and favored Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential run-off. Now his unexpected entrance has incited a firestorm among the most doctrinaire of the hardliners, who have accused him of conspiring to delegitimize the system by daring the clerical supervisors to reject his candidacy.

Whatever happens, though, the calculations of the politician nicknamed “The Shark” (a reference to his lack of facial hair as well as his wily political skills) have already upended a race expected to rely on a motley array of second-tier Iranian political figures. His close ally, former nuclear negotiator Hassan Ruhani, had previously pledged to quit if Rafsanjani ran; Ruhani is a sharp-elbowed politician who has been an early and consistent critic of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear diplomacy and economic policy. So far that withdrawal has not come, despite much Twitter speculation to the contrary, and other similar pacts among conservative contenders also appear to be fraying under the weight of a suddenly reconfigured competition.

The Rafsanjani wild card is only one novelty in a race replete with interest. The other aspirant whose registration on Saturday has electrified Iranian poll watchers is Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. Mashaei, a close advisor to Ahmadinejad, has long been the focus of fierce clerical ire as a result of his eclectic religious and political views. He was forced out of a vice presidential slot in 2009 and is routinely scorned as the mastermind of a ‘deviant current’ that has infiltrated the Islamic Republic in an effort to undermine it. Mashaei’s ambitions have been telegraphed over many months through increasingly unsubtle efforts of Ahmadinejad to stack the deck in his favor, culminating in the tandem appearance at Mashaei’s registration. That move prompted a legal complaint against the president – either a quaint nod at legalism in a patently manipulated electoral framework or the first step in a process of silencing the unpredictable Ahmadinejad via intimidation or imprisonment.

The calculations of Rafsanjani, Mashaei and Ahmadinejad are compelling in their own right, and they will no doubt influence Iran’s future. However, the drama associated with them has diverted attention from the likely electoral landscape, which features a less thrilling but still significant roster of contenders. For several months, some speculation has centered on former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, a pediatrician by original training whose entire 32-year political career is the product of patronage by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Others have long fixated on Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqr Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who has assiduously restyled himself as a moderate, modernist problem-solver. Another dark horse to watch closely Gholamali Haddad Adel, a parliamentary leader and literature professor whose daughter is married to Khamenei’s powerful son Mojtaba.

The real heavyweight in the pack, however, is Jalili, who was virtually unknown beyond a small circle of the Iranian leadership until his appointment as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in 2009. In leading the contentious negotiations with the international community over Iran’s nuclear program, he has personified Iran’s quixotic mix of defiance with occasional bursts of pragmatism. One of his early forays in the high-stakes talks featured a discursive lecture on the Prophet Mohammad’s diplomacy, the subject of his doctoral dissertation. But Jalili was also responsible for signing onto a Western confidence-building step in 2009 that was quickly disavowed by Tehran. He survived the ensuing outcry among conservatives unscathed, a testament to his primary patron, Khamenei, whose office he directed for four years. Of all the would-be aspirants for the presidency in this round, Jalili appears to benefit from an air of ordination, and already talk has emerged among other conservatives of withdrawing in order to bolster his competitiveness.

Setting aside the personality politics, the most astonishing, and important, dimension of the campaign is simply that we care at all. Four years ago, many observers – including myself – argued the blatant orchestration of Ahmadinejad’s reelection had all but extinguished the relevance of the electoral dimension of Iran’s convoluted governing system. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many academics forecast that Iran was descending into a military dictatorship. So many of these predictions now appear off the mark, as external analysts and politicians all too often find when interpreting Iran.

Let’s be clear – the 2013 ballot will be rigged to a greater or lesser extent depending on how the campaign evolves, and the winner will undoubtedly benefit from unabashed assistance from the institutions, including the Guard. However, as the initial maneuvers of the 2013 presidential race underscores, politics in Iran remain competitive, unpredictable, and captivating. So stay tuned, and watch this space. One week from today, Brookings will be launching Iran @ Saban, a new blog that will focus on political and economic developments within Iran as well as the threats posed by its current policies and the strategic responses of the international community. The blog will showcase the deep bench of Brookings scholarship on the Middle East and issues such as proliferation, terrorism and, of course, electoral politics and the future of Iran.

Authors

Suzanne Maloney

Minority Turnout Determined the 2012 Election

William H. Frey — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:49:00 -0400

While it may seem like the 2012 presidential election has been analyzed to death, the recent release of the Census Bureau’s November election survey points out the key role that minority voter turnout, especially for blacks, played in determining the outcome.

Until now, most of what we knew came from the National Election Pool exit poll which elicited Election Day candidate preferences of voters. The new, larger survey from the Census Bureau permits an examination of the voting-eligible population and the extent to which they turned out to vote. These turnout rates tell us a lot more about the enthusiasm, or lack thereof, among different groups.

Already, the Census Bureau’s report trumpeted the historically noteworthy finding that black turnout rates in 2012 exceeded that of whites for the first time. This, in an election when white turnout declined significantly and Hispanic and Asian turnout inched down modestly from 2008.

The rising black turnout can be viewed, to some degree, as continued strong support for the first black president. The downturn of white turnout might be attributed, in part, to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate or politics in general during a sluggish economy.

Before the election I made the case that a Democratic win would require a high minority turnout rate to counter what I then thought would be high turnout on the part of an energized Republican-voting white population. According to these new data, I was wrong about the rise in white turnout. But the question still remains: Was high minority turnout necessary for Obama to have won the national vote?

Changing Demographics, Turnout and Voting Margins

To answer this question now and in the future, an examination of the role of turnout in the context of the changing face of America’s electorate and the strong racial and ethnic preferences for Democratic and Republican candidates provides insight.

From purely an accounting perspective, shifts in election outcomes can be viewed as a product of (1) demographic changes in the eligible voter population; (2) changes in the turnout of different groups of eligible voters; and (3) the candidate preferences of those who vote. A look at the patterns for the three previous elections shows a striking move toward the Democrats on each of these dimensions.

With respect to eligible voters, the (typically Republican-leaning) white share of the electorate declined from 75.5 to 71.1 percent between 2004 and 2012 (Figure 1). During this period, the (typically Democratic leaning) combined black and Hispanic electorate rose to approach nearly quarter of eligible voters—a fraction that will rise in the future as more U.S.-born Hispanic children reach age 18.

In contrast to the constant shifts in eligible voter demographics, racial and ethnic trends in turnout and voter margins take a sharper turn after 2004.

White turnout continued to dive after the 2004 election when it was at a post 1992 high (Figure 2). In contrast, minority and especially black turnout moved in the opposite direction. The black turnout rates of 64.7 percent and 66.2 percent in the past two elections were the highest since 1968 when Census surveys began. Hispanic and Asian turnout improved markedly after 2004. For both groups, turnouts for the 2008 and 2012 elections were higher than any year since 1992.

With respect to voting margins, all three minority groups favored Democrats more strongly in the two post 2004 elections (Figure 3). The “tepid” 2004 black Democratic margin of 77 rose to 91 and 87 in the subsequent two elections, the highest margins in 40 years. Hispanic and Asian margins for Democrats also rose markedly for 2008 and 2012

For whites, the 2004 Republican margin was high by historical standards at 17. It declined in 2008 but then rose to an extremely high 20 in 2012—the largest white Republican margin since the 1984 Reagan-Mondale election.

So overall, compared with 2004, minorities showed: higher shares of eligible voters, higher turnout rates, and higher Democratic margins in the two most recent elections. For whites, on the other hand, post-2004 elections showed smaller shares of eligible voters and lower turnout. White voters did vote more strongly Republican in 2012, but this was offset by reduced turnout

The result, of course, was Obama wins in both 2008 and 2012. But how much of this is due to the rise in minority turnout and decline in turnout for whites?

With 2004 Turnout Levels: Republicans win in 2012 but not 2016

To assess the impact of turnout alone on the 2012 election I assumed that the national electorate had the size and racial and ethnic composition of the new Census survey and applied to it the more “Republican favorable” turnout rates of 2004 for each racial and ethnic group, as shown in Figure 2. This of course resulted in more white voters and fewer minority voters than actually occurred in 2012. To these voter populations, I applied the actual 2012 voting margins as shown in Figure 3. The result of this exercise was a small 2012 Romney win of 9,000 votes—a virtual tossup. Thus it might be said that the high minority and low white turnout rates of 2012 were responsible for Obama taking the national vote, irrespective of the changing demography of the electorate.

To see how much difference the higher 2012 turnout of minorities alone made in the final outcome, I conducted the same exercise assuming the “low” 2004 turnout rates for blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but with the actual 2012 white turnout rates. Under this scenario, the 2012 election is close with Obama ahead, but barely. So we might say that the high turnout of minorities, and blacks especially, did make a difference in the outcome of the 2012 election.

As a final exercise, I produced projections for the 2016 and 2020 elections which adjust Census Bureau population projections to estimate eligible voter populations by race and ethnicity in those years. Again, I contrast election outcomes, assuming 2004 “Republican favorable” versus 2012 “Democratic favorable” turnout rates, but in each case applying 2012 voter margins to each racial and ethnic group. This time, the Democratic candidates win under each scenario in each election, though with smaller margins when 2004 turnout rates are assumed.

What this tells me is that turnout will be less important for Democratic victory as demography changes in their favor, though they must maintain their strong voting margins among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For Republicans, the latter projections show that they cannot count primarily on white support to take the White House. Even assuming high 2004 turnout rates and 2012 Republican voting margins for whites, they cannot win unless they also peel off more votes among minorities. In this regard, demography indeed becomes destiny.

Authors

William H. Frey

The Road to War : Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed

Marvin Kalb — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2013 280pp.

If you remember the golden age of broadcast network news, then you probably welcomed Marvin Kalb into your living room on a regular basis. Recruited by Edward R. Murrow to join CBS News, Kalb went on to a distinguished three-decade career with CBS, and then NBC News. In The Road to War, Kalb examines the role of diplomatic commitments made by presidents. These commitments, rather than formal declarations of war, have led, one president after another, from Truman to Obama, to order American troops into wars all over the world.

Condensed Excerpt:

"Since World War II, presidents have relied more on commitments, public and private, than they have on declarations of war, even though the U.S. Constitution declares rather unambiguously that Congress has the responsibility to “declare war.”

Over the years, presidential commitments have come in different shapes and sizes, suggesting honor and integrity, strength and determination, the word of a president backed by the military power of the United States. No trifling matter, in diplomatic affairs. And yet . . .

Some commitments, such as America’s to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have been successful and durable, in part because they have been based on solemn treaties ratified by Congress. Another example is America’s commitment to South Korea, also based on a mutual defense treaty, supported by the presence of 28,500 American troops armed with nuclear weapons until December 1991.

No doubt, presidential commitments are seen as serious, almost sacred, promises to act made by a chief executive on behalf of his administration. And other nations may view these commitments as binding nation-to-nation promises that succeeding administrations will honor, too. But there is a problem. Will they?

"Words have consequence. Spoken by a president, they can often become American policy, with or without congressional approval."

In 1982, for example, President Ronald Reagan pledged America’s “iron- clad commitment to the defense of Israel.” The commitment made sense to Reagan at the time, and it has been echoed by one president after another ever since. But does Reagan’s pledge have the same resonance now that it did then? Much has to do with trust between leaders and countries. Do Israeli leaders trust President Barack Obama as much as they did Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? These are questions that cut to the heart—and viability—of a presidential commitment.

Words have consequence. Spoken by a president, they can often become American policy, with or without congressional approval. When a president “commits” the United States to a controversial course of action, he may be setting the nation on the road to war or on a road to reconciliation. In matters of national security, his powers have become awesome—his word decisive. Who decides when we go to war? The president decides. As former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told me, it “all depends” on the president. “It’s his call.” Likewise, it is his decision when and whether, and under what conditions, to support a friendly nation.

"In the final analysis, for reasons both political and military, Israel may, on its own, strike Iran. Would it then expect American diplomatic and military support? Obama has strongly implied yes. But, without a mutual defense treaty, there may always be a question about the durability and reliability of a presidential commitment."

A president, such as Barack Obama, for example, pledges that the United States has “an ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security—meaning, one would imagine, that if Israel were attacked, the United States would come to Israel’s defense. Is there anything more to this commitment than a presidential promise? Obviously, yes. Israel enjoys broad-based support from Congress and the American people. For the most part, both nations share common values and common aims. But the president is the key to determining the flow and texture of this delicate relationship.

A question often asked by political leaders in Israel is whether Obama will live up to his word. Will his commitment be honored or betrayed by him or by a successor? The answer to this question can mean war or peace. Might it not be better for both nations to negotiate a formal defense treaty—and, in this way, try to reduce or even eliminate areas of doubt in their relationship?

Another question: Obama has warned, more than once: “Let there be no doubt—America is determined to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.” It is said in Washington and Jerusalem that never before have Israel and the United States been in closer alignment on stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. True, and yet not quite true. In the final analysis, for reasons both political and military, Israel may, on its own, strike Iran. Would it then expect American diplomatic and military support? Obama has strongly implied yes. But, without a mutual defense treaty, there may always be a question about the durability and reliability of a presidential commitment.

Praise for The Road to War:

“Every road to war is ultimately also a tragedy. Kalb’s concluding chapter, however, offers a timely and important ray of hope: a defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel in the context of a fair peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians might avoid not just one but even two wars. President Obama should read this chapter.”
—Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser

“Marvin Kalb has written a fine book that should be required reading for everyone who wants to be president because it underlines what every president seems not to know in the beginning—that it is much easier to get into war than to get out of it. Terrific insight, carefully researched and clearly written.”
—Bob Schieffer, CBS News

“Kalb raises important questions about the unchecked power of presidents to take the nation to war. His provocative proposal for a U.S.-Israeli defense treaty will certainly add to the debate about the future of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.”
—Graham Allison, Harvard University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marvin Kalb

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Can Imran Khan Ride to Victory?

Madiha Afzal — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:27:00 -0400

With election day almost upon us, and with Imran Khan certainly enjoying momentum, the outcome of the May 11 election is anybody’s guess. Will Pakistan’s next government be led by the PML-N, by a PPP-led coalition, or a PTI-led coalition? Why do we have no idea what to expect? The main reason is that election campaigns are short and frenzied in Pakistan, with little time for polling (in contrast, the US presidential campaign, for example, lasts nearly two years, including the primaries). In addition, surveys are conducted at the national level, and are, therefore, largely meaningless in predicting outcomes in Pakistan’s parliamentary democracy. Surveys in Pakistan need to be undertaken at the electoral constituency level in order to have predictive power.

In this election, two additional factors have compounded the usual electoral uncertainty. The first is the emergence of the PTI as a serious third-party contender in a country where politics has hitherto been dominated by only two parties, effectively changing the landscape as we know it. Imran Khan has energised a disenchanted voting population, and voter turnout is expected to be higher than in previous elections. The second factor is demographic: specifically, the youth vote. There are 35 million new voters on the rolls in this election, most of them between the ages of 18 and 25.

Having mentioned the unknowns, it is worth better understanding what we do know. It is widely understood that there is a national-level incumbency disadvantage in Pakistani politics, with the PPP and the PML-N’s alternating stints in power in the 1990s. A national level incumbency disadvantage is to be expected this year, with approximately 91 per cent of the population dissatisfied with the way things are currently going in the country. The constituency-level roots of this national effect are not well-known. During the course of my work, using constituency-level election results data from 1988 to 1997, I show that incumbent MNAs who were elected by relatively small margins face a large incumbency disadvantage i.e., they are much less likely to be elected in the next election than candidates who previously lost by a small margin.

What does this empirical fact mean for the 2013 election? The biggest implication is that Mr Khan’s party may have a chance on May 11, since, all else equal, people are really voting against two incumbent parties this year i.e., against the national-level government of the PPP, and against the provincial Punjab government of the PML-N. Discussions with PTI supporters certainly bear out this hypothesis — their vote is as much a vote for Imran as a vote against the other parties. In addition, Mr Khan’s party platform and campaign of a Naya Pakistan is, in a word (or two), anti-status quo. His campaign has also effectively used some pages from US President Barack Obama’s social media strategy during his first electoral campaign, championing ‘change’.

What about the high-ranking and powerful PML-N and PPP candidates, those who are long-standing politicians? They are unlikely to be replaced by a PTI newcomer. On the other hand, any relatively weak candidates from these parties need to be very worried. But, one may counter, Imran Khan’s appeal need not translate to each candidate his party has fielded for election across Pakistan’s electoral constituencies. I would argue that in these constituencies, if the vote is truly a vote against the PPP and the PML-N candidates and a vote for the PTI, candidate identities largely will not matter. This is not unthinkable in a country where party trumps candidate identity at important points (such as when candidates cross party lines to move away from the unpopular incumbent party).

In a country rife with ethnic, sectarian, provincial, class and political conflicts and on a downward spiral, Mr Khan represents the one source of passionate unity for the country — cricket — and a true source of national pride: the leader of the 1992 cricket World Cup victory. Given this, he has truly picked an ingenious party symbol with the bat. He has also run a tireless campaign, culminating in his chilling fall on May 7. Whether or not his efforts will pan out, we will know soon.

There is hope for an Imran Khan victory, and with it, a renewal of lost confidence regarding the power of the vote. There is a palpable energy in the air, similar to Benazir Bhutto’s election to power in 1988. But let’s not forget that a violent and bloody campaign led to this historic election. The attacks against the ANP and the MQM have reshaped the electoral map and restricted the field of candidacy. In fact, we have seen disqualification of candidates similar to the 2002 election with the laws limiting candidacy instituted by General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, except this time, instead of Musharraf, the Taliban are (literally) calling the shots. This is a situation far from ideal and hardly represents a flourishing democracy. But a strong vote for Mr Khan will reassure many that a Naya Pakistan may yet be possible.

It is ironic that the very existence of an incumbency disadvantage that Mr Khan may ride to a victory has harmful consequences. For legislators on the margin, who know they will be voted out in the next election, an incumbency disadvantage is likely to create incentives for extraction and corruption. But this all rides on the politician’s expectation of being voted out. That may no longer exist if Pakistan sees a political sea-change in the election of the PTI.

Authors

Madiha Afzal

Publication: The Express Tribune

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