I know. It sounds like a set up for a bad joke, but the answer is they are both proud owners of The China Diary of George H. W. Bush.

The Examiner site reports that Yao Ming twittered about receiving a gift from former President George H. W. Bush–a copy of his 2008 book. The book is a day-by-day account of President Bush’s time in China as head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing . The entries from 1974 and 1975 capture the culture (biking around Beijing) and the political conflicts (most famously with Henry Kissinger) of the era.

This just came across my desk. Rep. Steve Israel (NY-02) has introduced legislation to create an American Democracy Index that is built on the research of Heather Gerken at Yale. We recently published her book-length argument on the need to gather information about how we vote and create a national ranking system so states can assess election reforms that work.

News Release 111-076

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 6, 2009

For more information, contact:

Lindsay Hamilton 202-225-3335

lindsay.hamilton@mail.house.gov

News Release

Rep. Israel Announces Legislation to Assess and Improve Election Systems Across the Country

The American Democracy Index will analyze voter and election administration data to publish a state-by-state analysis of practices prior to the 2012 elections

Washington, DC – On Friday, Rep. Steve Israel (D – New York) announced new legislation to assess and improve election systems throughout the country.  The American Democracy Index Act (H.R.4033) seeks to improve election administration throughout the United States by ranking states on election performance and comparing best and worst practices.

“For too many Americans, our election system is marred by long lines, lost ballots and controversial recounts. Our elections should be conducted in a way that makes Americans want to vote. It should be easy, expedient and accurate. The American Democracy Index will tell us where we’re succeeding and where we’re failing so that we can make improvements based on what works,” said Rep. Israel.

“The American election system remains deeply flawed, even after the debacle of 2000 and the Help America Vote Act that followed. Fixing the system requires real knowledge about what is working and what isn’t,” said Norm Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute scholar and Co-Director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. “A great first step would be a Democracy Index that requires good data from all states and localities to analyze the problems, and an ability to rank jurisdictions according to whether they are serving democracy by running elections well, or falling short of their peers and of any reasonable standards. Steve Israel has been a leader in pushing for ways to make the American election system the model it should be; this bill is another solid step in that direction.”

“Access to accurate information is the first requirement of good policy-making,” said Trevor Potter, a former Republican Chairman of the Federal Election Commission who now heads the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.  “This bill will mandate that the government obtain and publish the best information that can be gathered about the functioning of our election system–and every political party should agree that is a very good and important thing to do.”

During the 2000 election, between 1.5 and 3 million votes were lost because of the registration process. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, about 1 million registered voters said they did not vote because polling lines were too long or polling hours were too short. Following the 2004 presidential election, 43 percent of local officials surveyed reported that an electronic voting system had malfunctioned.

The American Democracy Index Act requires that the Election Assistance Commission contract with an entity to collect voter data and publish the American Democracy Index for the federal election cycle of 2012. The American Democracy Index (ADI) will present voter and election administration data on a state-by-state basis in a manner designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of election administration practices. States will be ranked according to criteria established by an independent advisory board of election administration experts in consultation with the Election Assistance Commission. The legislation also establishes a pilot program for the 2010 federal election cycle to create an index that ranks localities within five states to measure the effectiveness of their election administration.

The concept is based on a proposal that Yale Law School Professor Heather Gerken wrote about in her book, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It. She argues that a “Democracy Index” – a public ranking of election performances around the country – would encourage states to take real steps to make voting easier.

The bill also authorizes funding to assist states with reporting requirements.

Rep. Israel is a leader in the House of Representatives on election reform. In the 110^th and 111^th Congress, he introduced the Weekend Voting Act which seeks to move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend in an effort to increase voter participation.

Rep. Israel serves on the House Appropriations Committee.

Continued »

“It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it,” writes Matthew Yglesias on his blog.

He notes that “empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues,” and recommends Princeton Readings in American Politics, edited by Richard Valelly, to “anyone interested in deepening their understanding of American politics.”

It is with great pride we congratulate Elinor Ostrom, co-winner, with Oliver Williamson, of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics and author of the Princeton University Press book UNDERSTANDING INSTITUTIONAL DIVERSITY.  And I hear through the grapevine that we have another project of hers coming out in the not-to-distant future.  Stay tuned!

Congratulations, again, Elinor!

Amy Zegart, author of Spying Blind (now available in paperback) and the forthcoming book CIA 101, reads the CIA Inspector General’s Interrogation Report (an “eye-opener”) and posts her top five findings at Reality-Based Community.

1. The CIA was not a rogue elephant.
The Inspector General found that “there were few instances of deviations from approved [detention and interrogation] procedures.” (p.5) …The report also gives a picture of the agency repeatedly asking for– and getting — both authorization and reassurance from several NSC principals as well as the Department of Justice.

2. It’s the rules, not the exceptions, that alarm the IG. The IG was deeply concerned about the legal basis and political fallout of the detention and interrogation policies themselves.

3. We don’t know what interrogation methods work best.

4. All ten of the IG’s recommendations to improve detention and interrogation practices were redacted, which makes you wonder: are they blacked out because the CIA implemented them (making them current practice) or because the Agency didn’t?

5. Whither Congress? It seems that Congress has known about these practices AND about the violations that went beyond what DOJ authorized for at least three years, probably longer.

Click over to read the complete article.

UCLA has posted a great article about Lynn Vavreck’s new book The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns.

A quick excerpt, though the rest of it really is worth a read:

In pursuing the project, Vavreck said she was inspired by two seemingly conflicting situations in American politics: the staggering costs of presidential elections and research that has shown economic forecasting models predict the outcomes of U.S. presidential races with an 80-percent accuracy rate.

“If we can predict the election in advance, then why do we spend a billion dollars in a campaign?” Lynn Vavreck said. “That was the puzzle that kept me up at night. I wanted to figure out whether all those things people say in campaigns really add value, and the answer is yes, the message matters, but so does the economic context.”

James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira have written a timely new book called CITIZENS, COURTS, AND CONFIRMATIONS, which examines the influence of public opinion on Supreme Court Nominations. As the news of Sonia Sotomayor continues to flood newspapers and blogosphere alike, this book is a enlightening examination of how and why people form opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shapes perceptions of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy–the authors use the Alito nomination as a case study.

James Gibson has written a new article on the subject in the current issue of Miller-McCune Magazine.

And on the blog The Monkey Cage, Joshua Tucker has mentioned the book, as well.

Rob Ellman of Intrepid Liberal Journal posted a new interview with Chris Eisgruber over the weekend. Eisgruber’s book, The Next Justice, is now available in paperback. Listen in here.

Princeton University Press would like to congratulate Jeff Madrick and his book THE CASE FOR BIG GOVERNMENT for being a finalist in the 2009 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.  It was one of three books, and the only university press book on the list.  The award went to Steve Coll for his excellent book The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.  The other finalist was Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

“‘Empathy’ is just the latest in a string of concepts designed to suggest that we can talk intelligibly about Supreme Court appointments in politically neutral terms. ‘Judicial restraint,’ ‘minimalism,’ ‘character,’ ‘precedent,’ ‘respecting the text’: like empathy, they matter, but like empathy, they are ultimately Hamlet without the Prince,” writes Christopher Eisgruber at the ACS Blog.

So what is missing from the discussion? According to Eisgruber, the discussion needs to shift from empathy to judicial philosophy.

“Obama believes–rightly, I think–that we should want a Supreme Court justice with a very different judicial philosophy,” writes Eisgruber.

“Until we admit what kind of questions really matter to assessing the career of a Supreme Court justice, our public debates about Supreme Court nominations will continue to be a kind of charade. It is numbing to imagine confirmation hearings focused on whether some distinguished lawyer is sufficiently empathetic. President Obama is himself a first-rate constitutional lawyer, and I suspect he knows this. It would be a gift to the country if, at some point in his presidency, he were to say so.”

Read the complete article and leave your comments here.

John Hulsman, co-author with A. Wess Mitchell, on the new book THE GODFATHER DOCTRINE: A Foreign Policy Parable, discussed and debated the book with Eli Lake of the New Republic and Washington Times over at our friends Bloggingheads.tv.  A very lively chat!  Watch for yourself…