While it’s unclear how Wall Street will respond to the final Volcker Rule proposal, one thing is clear: the banks have done their very best to bend and shape the rule by never leaving regulators alone.
Continue readingNavigating the new landscape of transparency and journalism
The intersecting worlds of big data, transparency and journalism are changing rapidly.
Need a roadmap to the new terrain? Fortunately, the University of Oxford has teamed up with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to produce a new volume: Transparency in Politics and the Media: Accountability and Open Government. The volume brings forth a star-studded line-up of journalists and academics to give the latest and greatest lay-of-the-land for those who want to get up to speed on what’s what.
Though there’s no substitute for reading all the contributions, I’ve tried to distill some of the highlights and big picture “here’s where things are heading” insights into the three big areas the book covers: big data, transparency and journalism
OpenGov Conversations: Lee Drutman on Three Types of Accountability
This post is part of our series, OpenGov Conversations, an ongoing discourse featuring contributions from transparency and accountability researchers and practitioners around the world.
This post responds to the following question: What is the role of citizen engagement in the ability of transparency policies and initiatives to hold governments accountable?
Unlike the others in this series who have been working on the ground to implement transparency policies and initiatives, I have not. My background is in political science, so I’m going to do something that political scientists often do. I’m going to theorize and I’m going to offer a typology.
Though we tend to talk about accountability as if it is one thing, I think there are actually three types of government accountability that we care about: preference accountability, character accountability, and performance accountability. And each of these has its own relationship to citizen engagement. By better understanding this, we can better understand the citizen engagement – transparency – accountability nexus.
Continue readingAgainst the ‘Against Disclosure’ column in the New York Times
In this today’s New York Times’ Gray Matter column, political scientist David M. Primo has penned a piece with a provocative title: “Against Disclosure.” In it, he highlights his own survey research, in which respondents given a hypothetical ballot measure and exposed to news reports that included campaign finance disclosure data did no better identifying the position of different interest groups than those votes who merely read news accounts and saw a voter guide. Both the Times article and Primo’s underlying research are misleading.
Continue readingHow to know the Senate better through data visualization
The shutdown has been averted. The debt ceiling has been raised. For now. In the process, Congress’ public approval has fallen to around 10 percent – and as low as 5 percent in one poll. But how much do you know about who actually serves in Congress? How do you know who to even disapprove of? Today, we unveil a new interactive tool that will allow you to get to know the U.S. Senate a little better. While it’s easy to focus on prominent Senate leaders like Harry Reid (D-Nev.) or Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or prominent grandstanders like Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), we think it matters who our 100 senators are: What are their backgrounds? What is their education? What did they do before coming to the Senate? Who do they depend on most to support their campaigns? All of these factors shape how they collectively make decisions. For this reason, we’ve created an interactive tool that allows you to explore the U.S. Senate. You can see how Senators break down across a wide variety of dimensions.
Continue readingThe 1,000 donors most likely to benefit from McCutcheon — and what they are most likely to do
If the Supreme Court lifts limits on aggregate individual campaign contributions, as it may very likely do in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, it will empower the limited number of donors who have the heart, the stomach and the bankrolls to contribute hundreds of thousands of their own money to determine who is in office. These truly elite donors are poised to be the big winners.
In our recent analysis on the 1% of the 1%, we looked at the top 31,385 donors (.01% of the U.S. population). Today, we will focus just on the top 1,000 donors: the donors most likely to up their political giving if they are given the chance to donate even more. All of these donors contributed at least $134,300 of their own money in the 2012 election.
Our best guess is that parties and leadership committees will converge on these donors, giving roughly 1000 people a unique ability to set and limit the party agendas. Presumably, they will shift their money from super PACs to party committees because giving directly to party and leadership committees affords these donors more opportunities to talk directly to party leaders, and increases their bargaining power within the party structure. And party leaders want to control the money and the messages it buys.
2. Almost 2/3 of the Top 1,000 donors primarily support Republicans
The Politics of the Government Shutdown – In One Chart
As the government shutdown begins, so does the blame game. Is it Republicans’ fault? Democrats’ fault? While the endless speculation keeps pundits busy, it’s important to remember that members of Congress don’t care about “the public” in the abstract. They care about the public in their district.
We say “district” because any deal to re-start the government will require agreement by both the House and the Senate. While senators, with their broader constituencies, have to worry more about voters in the center, no such pressure exists for most House members. A quick analysis finds roughly seven in eight House Republicans (86.6 percent, to be exact, or 201 of 232) won with at least 55 percent of the vote in 2012. Additionally, 140 Republicans (60.3 percent of the caucus) won with at least 60 percent of the vote. The chart below shows the distribution of seats by margin of victory. Note: most Democrats also come from safe seats.
How many donors will benefit if the Supreme Court allows unlimited campaign contributions?
Yesterday, my colleague Lisa Rosenberg previewed what’s at stake in the upcoming Supreme Court case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. On Oct. 8, judges will rule on the constitutionality of the overall limit on contributions to federal candidates and political parties. Currently, the limits are set at $74,600 to political committees, and $48,600 to candidates – $123,200 overall. If the court sides with the plaintiffs, those limits will be a thing of the past.
Everybody is buzzing about what will happen if the courts lift the aggregate limits. Will more donors start writing multi-million dollar checks? Will the campaign finance system flood with even more money?
What Eduardo Porter gets wrong about corporate money and the GOP
If there is a “reluctance of corporations to spend on politics,” somebody forgot to tell the corporations. As far as I can tell, corporations are still spending ridiculous sums here in Washington. This surprising assertion comes from the New York Times’ Eduardo Porter, who wrote an article in today’s paper trying to puzzle through what would be a provocative question if the premise were true: “How did corporate America lose control of the Republican Party?” Porter’s thesis seems to be that corporations should have spent more money to shape the make-up of the Republican Party in Congress. If they had, they’d be better poised to get some action on immigration reform and infrastructure improvement. “Corporations’ reluctance to open their checkbooks,” Porter writes, “suggests an intriguing alternative explanation for the rise of Republicans who are willing to defy their will.” Let’s set a few things straight.
Continue readingGoldman Sachs and the political battle over aluminum
With the Senate Banking Committee already holding hearings over Goldman Sachs’ now-infamous aluminum market manipulations, Slate’s Matt Yglesias wonders if there may be a backlash. He notes that the victims are no longer the diffuse and poorly-organized residents of the mythologized “Main Street.” Instead, they are now the big industrial purchasers of aluminum, notably the big beverage companies and automakers. As Yglesias argues:
The key thing here is that while Goldman Sachs is a big company with political clout in the United States, so is MillerCoors. So is Coca-Cola. So are PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group. So is General Motors. When you get a situation where large industrial firms want the federal government to do something that banks don't to do, then the odds of the banks losing get pretty good.Yglesias has a good point. When resources and clout are substantial on both sides, resources and clout are much less likely to be determinative. When both sides have the money to get in the game, other factors (such as, say, the low public esteem of Goldman Sachs) may turn out to be equally important. Indeed, this could be a fascinating political battle, as business vs. business scraps often are. Who knows how it will play out? What we do know is what the current balance of resources looks like. And the current balance of resources comes down strongly on the side of securities and investment industry.
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