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Despite the attention on the mid-term races, few elections are competitive. Electoral competition, already low at the national level, is in decline in state and primary elections as well. Reformers, who point to gerrymandering and a host of other targets for change, argue that improving competition will produce voters who are more interested in elections, better-informed on issues, and more likely to turn out to the polls.

On October 27, the Brookings Institution—in conjunction with the Cato Institute and The Pew Research Center—presented a discussion and a groundbreaking survey exploring the attitudes and opinions of voters in competitive and noncompetitive congressional districts. The survey, part of Pew's regular polling on voter attitudes, was conducted through the weekend of October 21. A series of questions explored the public's perceptions, knowledge, and opinions about electoral competitiveness.

The discussion also explored a publication that addresses the startling lack of competition in our democratic system. The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics (Brookings, 2006), considers the historical development, legal background, and political aspects of a system that is supposed to be responsive and accountable, yet for many is becoming stagnant, self-perpetuating, and tone-deaf. Michael McDonald, editor and Brookings visiting fellow, moderated a discussion among co-editor John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter from The Pew Research Center, who also discussed the survey.

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Scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute are collaborating to promote transparency in redistricting. In January 2010, an advisory board of experts and representatives of good government groups was convened in order to articulate principles for transparent redistricting and to identify barriers to the public and communities who wish to create redistricting plans. This document summarizes the principles for transparency in redistricting that were identified during that meeting.

Benefits of a Transparent, Participative Redistricting Process

The drawing of electoral districts is among the most easily manipulated and least transparent systems in democratic governance. All too often, redistricting authorities maintain their monopoly by imposing high barriers to transparency and public participation. Increasing transparency and public participation can be a powerful counterbalance by providing the public with information similar to that which is typically only available to official decision makers, which can lead to different outcomes and better representation.

Increasing transparency can empower the public to shape the representation for their communities, promote public commentary and discussion about redistricting, inform legislators and redistricting authorities which district configurations their constituents and the public support, and educate the public about the electoral process.  

Fostering public participation can enable the public to identify their neighborhoods and communities, promote the creation of alternative maps, and facilitate an exploration of a wide range of representational possibilities. The existence of publicly-drawn maps can provide a measuring stick against which an official plan can be compared, and promote the creation of a “market” for plans that support political fairness and community representational goals.

Transparency Principles

All redistricting plans should include sufficient information so the public can verify, reproduce, and evaluate a plan. Transparency thus requires that:

• Redistricting plans must be available in non-proprietary formats.
• Redistricting plans must be available in a format allowing them to be easily read and analyzed with commonly-used geographic information software.
• The criteria used as a basis for creating plans and individual districts must be clearly documented.

Creating and evaluating redistricting plans and community boundaries requires access to demographic, geographic, community, and electoral data. Transparency thus requires that:

• All data necessary to create legal redistricting plans and define community boundaries must be publicly available, under a license allowing reuse of these data for non-commercial purposes.
• All data must be accompanied by clear documentation stating the original source, the chain of ownership (provenance), and all modifications made to it.

Software systems used to generate or analyze redistricting plans can be complex, impossible to reproduce, or impossible to correctly understand without documentation. Transparency thus requires that:

• Software used to automatically create or improve redistricting plans must be either open-source or provide documentation sufficient for the public to replicate the results using independent software.
• Software used to generate reports that analyze redistricting plans must be accompanied by documentation of data, methods, and procedures sufficient for the reports to be verified by the public.

Services offered to the public to create or evaluate redistricting plans and community boundaries are often opaque and subject to misinterpretation unless adequately documented. Transparency thus requires that:

• Software necessary to replicate the creation or analysis of redistricting plans and community boundaries produced by the service must be publicly available.
• The service must provide the public with the ability to make available all published redistricting plans and community boundaries in non-proprietary formats that are easily read and analyzed with commonly-used geographic information software.
• Services must provide documentation of any organizations providing significant contributions to their operation.

Promoting Public Participation

New technologies provide opportunities to broaden public participation in the redistricting process. These technologies should aim to realize the potential benefits described and be consistent with the articulated transparency principles.

Redistricting is a legally and technically complex process. District creation and analysis software can encourage broad participation by: being widely accessible and easy to use; providing mapping and evaluating tools that help the public to create legal redistricting plans, as well as maps identifying local communities; be accompanied by training materials to assist the public to successfully create and evaluate legal redistricting plans and define community boundaries; have publication capabilities that allow the public to examine maps in situations where there is no access to the software; and promoting social networking and allow the public to compare, exchange and comment on both official and community-produced maps.

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Official Endorsement from Organizations – Americans for Redistricting Reform, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, Campaign Legal Center, Center for Governmental Studies, Center for Voting and Democracy, Common Cause, Demos, and the League of Women Voters of the United States.

Attending board members – Nancy Bekavac, Director, Scientists and Engineers for America; Derek Cressman, Western Regional Director of State Operations, Common Cause; Anthony Fairfax, President, Census Channel; Representative Mike Fortner (R), Illinois General Assembly; Karin Mac Donald, Director, Statewide Database, Berkeley Law, University of California, Berkeley; Leah Rush, Executive Director, Midwest Democracy Network; Mary Wilson, President, League of Women Voters.

Editors – Micah Altman, Harvard University and the Brookings Institution; Thomas E. Mann, Brookings Institution; Michael P. McDonald, George Mason University and the Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute.

This project is funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.

       

Every 10 years — unfortunately, sometimes more frequently — legislative district lines are redrawn to balance population for demographic changes revealed by the census. What goes on is much more than a simple technical adjustment of boundaries, with ramifications that largely escape public notice.

Politicians often use redistricting as an opportunity to cut unfavorable constituents and potential challengers out of their districts. Barack Obama, for example, learned the rough and tumble of redistricting politics when Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) carved Obama's Chicago home out of Rush's congressional district after losing a 2000 primary challenge to Obama, then a state senator.

Incumbents can also use redistricting to move favorable constituents into their districts. Obama himself used the state legislative redistricting to extend his predominantly African American district north into a wealthy area of Illinois known as the Gold Coast. This new constituency allowed Obama to hone an effective biracial campaigning style that served him well when he ran for the U.S. Senate and the presidency.

Critically, these decisions are made with little or no public input or accountability. While Arizona and California are among the few states that give the public a chance to see and participate in how the boundaries are set, by using open redistricting commissions, most states gerrymander legislative lines behind closed doors. Figures from both major parties tilt the electoral playing field so much that one party is essentially assured of winning a given district, controlling the state legislature or winning the most seats in the state's congressional delegation. In other words, the democratic process is subverted. In this system, politicians select voters rather than voters electing politicians.

A 2006 Pew survey found that 70 percent of registered voters had no opinion about congressional redistricting. Among the few that expressed an opinion, some mistook the question to be about school districts rather than congressional districts.

For many reasons it has been hard to fault the public. An immense amount of population data must be sifted and then assembled, much like a giant jigsaw puzzle, to ensure that districts satisfy complex federal requirements relating to equal population and the Voting Rights Act, and varying state requirements that may include compactness and respect for existing political boundaries or communities. And access to these data and the software necessary to assemble and analyze them have long been out of public reach.

In the previous round of redistricting, according to a 2002 survey of authorities we conducted with our colleague Karin Mac Donald, most states did not provide any tools, facilities, dedicated assistance or software to support the public in developing redistricting plans. Many states failed to provide even minimal transparency by making data available, providing information about their plans online or accepting publicly submitted plans. Many redistricting authorities have not made firm plans to support transparency or public participation in the current round of redistricting.

In the coming year, however, technological advancements will enable anyone with a Web browser and an interest in how he or she is represented to draw district maps of his or her community and state that meet the same requirements as official submissions. Under the direction of scholars at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, and with consultation from an array of experts in redistricting issues, we have developed a set of principles for transparency and public participation. These principles have been endorsed by an array of stakeholders, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters of the United States.

Americans will be able to participate directly in their democracy by offering plans to be compared with the politician-drawn maps. The public and even the courts will no longer have to accept that whatever is devised by politicians in the backroom.

The Wizard of Oz appeared powerful because he hid behind a curtain -- until it was pulled back. The time has come to pull back the curtain on redistricting. A good place to start is by passing Rep. John Tanner's Redistricting Transparency Act, which has 38 co-sponsors from both parties. If Congress will not act, state governments can follow the lead of the few states that provide for meaningful transparency and public participation. Failure to provide for transparency and public participation should be recognized for what it is: an obviously self-serving act, placing the interests of politicians above the public interest.

       

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As the recent primary in Delaware attests, this year's midterm elections continue to offer unexpected twists and raise large questions. Will the Republicans take over the House and possibly the Senate? Or has the Republican wave ebbed? What role will President Obama play in rallying seemingly dispirited Democrats -- and what effect will reaction to the sluggish economy play in rallying Republicans? Is the Tea Party more an asset or a liability to the G.O.P.'s hopes? What effect will the inevitably narrowed partisan majorities have in the last two year's of Obama's first term? And how will contests for governorships and state legislatures around the nation affect redistricting and the shape of politics to come?

On October 4, a panel of Brookings Governance Studies scholars, moderated by Senior Fellow E.J. Dionne, Jr., attempted to answer these questions. Senior Fellow Thomas Mann provided an overview. Senior Fellow Sarah Binder discussed congressional dynamics under shrunken majorities or divided government. Senior Fellow William Galston offered his views on the administration’s policy prospects during the 112th Congress. Nonresident Senior Fellow Michael McDonald addressed electoral reapportionment and redistricting around the country.

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Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s write-in candidacy for reelection makes her the latest to join a growing number of prominent politicians who have shed political affiliations in the hopes of winning public office.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is running as an independent for the Senate, former Sen. Lincoln Chafee is running as an independent for Rhode Island governor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg became an independent to run New York City, and, of course, Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the 2006 Democratic Senate primary — but won in the general as an independent.

The trend of moderate independent candidates who have forsworn party affiliations is not new to U.S. politics. Since the Civil War, when the modern Republican Party was established to compete against the Democratic Party, minor party or unaffiliated candidates have won election to the House or Senate a total of 697 times. Of these, 89 percent of elected minor party candidates had voting records ideologically between the two major parties.

Despite the recent polarization of U.S. politics, history tells us that moderates make winners. Consider the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Its development has a familiar ring to today’s politics. Extremist elements flourished in the Republican Party during the Great Depression, growing out of our nation’s economic anxieties. GOP moderates responded by creating this Wisconsin group, focused on issues of reform and pragmatic governance.

It started when Wisconsin Gov. Philip La Follette ran for reelection in 1932 as the GOP nominee. He was heckled throughout his speeches by Republican ‘Stalwarts’ on his political right. They “had their Phil” and were angered by his policies of perceived higher taxes to support government spending. La Follette lost the Republican primary to Stalwart-backed Walter Kohler amid then-record turnout. Kohler lost to the Democrat in the general election.

La Follette is a famous political name. Gov. Philip La Follette and Sen. Robert La Follette Jr. were sons of the leading GOP politician, Sen. Robert La Follette Sr. Republican progressives had supported him for the party’s presidential nomination in 1912 and 1916. He eventually ran for president in 1924 — on his own Independent Progressive Party ticket. But while the father’s exploits are well-known, his sons’ reactions to Wisconsin’s political climate are more relevant to today’s politics.

Frustrated by the GOP extremists, the La Follette brothers created the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and they ran as party candidates when successfully elected governor and senator in 1934. Today’s independent candidates share a similar frustration with the ideological purists on their right and left. The extremists in the Democratic and Republican primary electorates are rejecting centrist candidates who might be better positioned to win general elections.

Consider the words of Crist when he declared his Independent candidacy. “If you want somebody on the right or you want somebody on the left,” Crist said, “you have the former speaker, Rubio, or the congressman, Meek. If you want somebody who has common sense, who puts the will of the people first, who wants to fight for the people first, now you've got Charlie Crist. You have a choice.”

With all the attention paid to the successes of Tea Party activists during the GOP primaries, it is easy to forget that these are not like general elections. Primary voters tend to be more ideologically extreme. So these Republican primary voters may end up denying the party several general election victories.

For example, many political observers agree that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), a moderate, would have been a stronger candidate for Senate than the GOP primary victor, Christine O’Donnell, his tea party-backed opponent. General elections have traditionally been won in the center -- where most voters still reside.

Minor party successes usually arise when the two major political parties become ideologically polarized. Moderates can usually find a seat under a big tent, but when party activists are unable to tolerate dissent, moderates are shut out and left to their own devices. So it isn’t surprising that strong candidates holding moderate positions realize they are electorally viable by abandoning their party and appealing to the center in general elections.

History tells us that conditions now are favorable for moderates like Chafee, Crist, Lieberman, and Murkowski. They step into a political vacuum at the center that the major parties created by moving to the political extremes. With room left for further polarization, this may be just the beginning of the rise of moderate independent candidates.

History also tells us the political party that first figures out how to recapture the middle -- and bring these candidates and their supporters into the fold -- is the one most likely to emerge as dominant.

       

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The drawing of legislative district boundaries is among the most self-interested and least transparent systems in American democratic governance. All too often, formal redistricting authorities maintain their control by imposing high barriers to transparency and to public participation in the process. Reform advocates believe that opening that process to the public could lead to different outcomes and better representation.

On January 20, Brookings hosted a briefing to review how redistricting in the 50 states will unfold in the months ahead and present a number of state-based initiatives designed to increase transparency and public participation in redistricting. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellows Micah Altman and Michael McDonald unveiled open source mapping software which enables users to create and submit their own plans, based on current census and historical election data, to redistricting authorities and to disseminate them widely. Such alternative public maps could offer viable input to the formal redistricting process.

After each presentation, participants took audience questions.

Learn more about Michael McDonald's Public Mapping Project »

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• Injecting Transparency into Redistricting
• GOP Could Re-Draw 145 Districts
• Towards a New Political Culture
• Coalitions Pushing for Greater Transparency
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Now that the 2010 Census is concluded, states will begin the process of reapportionment—re-drawing voting district lines to account for population shifts. Nonresident Senior Fellow Michael McDonald says redistricting has been fraught with controversy and corruption since the nation’s early days, when the first “gerrymandered” district was drawn. Two states—Arizona and California—have instituted redistricting commissions intended to insulate the process from political shenanigans, but politicians everywhere will continue to work the system to gain electoral advantage and the best chance of re-election for themselves and their parties.

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Thousands of Americans are already casting their votes in the 2012 elections through a variety of vote-by-mail and in-person balloting that allows citizens to cast their votes well in advance of November 6. From military personnel posted overseas to absentee voters, these early voting opportunities give voters the opportunity to make their voices heard even when they can’t stand in line on Election Day. However, there are pitfalls in the process.

Expert Michael McDonald says that while a great deal of attention has been focused on voter fraud, the untold story is that during the last presidential election, some 400,000 absentee ballots were discarded as improperly submitted. How can early voters make sure their voices are heard? What effect will absentee and other early voting programs have in this election year? On September 26, McDonald took your questions and comments in a live web chat moderated by Vivyan Tran of POLITICO.

12:30 Vivyan Tran: Welcome everyone, let's get started.

12:30 Michael McDonald: Early voting was 30% of all votes cast in the 2008 election. My expectation is that 35% of all votes in 2012 will be cast prior to Election Day. In some states, the volume will be much higher. In the battleground state of CO, about 85% of the votes will be cast early; 70% in FL; and 45% in Ohio.

What does it all mean? Hopefully I will be able to answer that question in today's chat!

12:30 Comment from JMC: At what point do you think that the in person early voters become less partisan types eager to cast their vote and more "regular folks" who would be more swayed by debate performances, TV ads, and the like?

12:30 Comment from Jason: 400,000 absentee ballots were discarded in 2008? How?

12:30 Michael McDonald: Reasons why election officials reject mail ballots: unsigned, envelope not sealed, multiple ballots in one envelope, etc. 400K rejected in 2008 does not include the higher rate of spoiled ballots that typically occur with paper mail ballots compared to electronic recording devices used in polling places. Moral: make sure you follow closely the proper procedures to cast your mail ballot!

12:31 Michael McDonald: @JMC: If they are going to vote early, most people wait until the week prior to the election. Those voting now have already made up their minds. But, the polls indicate many people have already done so, so maybe we see more early voting in 2012 as a consequence.

12:31 Comment from User: It was my understanding that absentee ballots are never counted unless the race is incredibly close in a particular state? Is that true - or do the rules for that vary by state?

12:32 Michael McDonald: No, all early votes are counted. What may not be counted, depending on state law and if the election is close enough for them to matter, are provisional ballots.

12:33 Comment from Damion: The blurb here says 400,000 early votes were discarded. Shouldn't the board of elections be reprimanded for that? Who was at fault and what consequences were there?

12:33: Michael McDonald: No, these are ballots "discarded" because people did not follow proper procedures and they must be rejected by law.

12:33 Comment from Shirley: Can you Facebook your vote in?

12:34 Michael McDonald: No. However, election officials are transmitting ballots electronically to overseas citizens and military voters. Voters must print the ballot, fill it out, sign it, scan it, and return. There are ways for these voters to verify that their ballot was received.

12:35 Comment from Karen K: What kind of impact could these discards have on the 2012 election?

12:36 Michael McDonald: Difficult to say. More Republicans vote by mail (excluding all mail ballot states). But, we don't know much about those who fail to follow the procedures. They might be less educated or elderly, and thus might counter the overall trend we see in mail balloting. Who knows?

12:37 Comment from User: This is the first I've heard of so many early votes getting discarded. Is this an issue people are addressing in a serious way?

12:38 Michael McDonald: Unfortunately, we are too focused on issues like voter fraud, which are low occurrence events, when there are many more important ways in which votes are lost in the system. Hopefully we can get the message out so fewer people disenfranchise themselves.

12:39 Comment from Anonymous: What do we know so far about absentee votes for 2012? Can we tell who they're leaning toward in specific states and how?

12:40 Michael McDonald: It's a little early :) yet. One of the major changes from 2008 is that the overseas civilian ballots -- a population that leans D -- was sent ballots much earlier this year than in 2008. We'll get a much better sense of the state of play in the two weeks prior to the election.

12:41 Michael McDonald: That said, the number of absentee ballot requests is running about the same as in 2008, if not a little higher, suggesting that the early vote will indeed be higher than in 2008, and perhaps that overall turnout will be on par with 2008, too.

12:41 Comment from Leslie: So, how can I ensure my early ballot is counted? There are so many rules and regulations, I'm never sure I've brought/filled out the paperwork.

12:42 Michael McDonald: Many states and localities allow people to check on-line the status of their ballot. Do a search for your local election official's webpage to see if that is available to you.

12:42 Comment from Daryyl: Can you define provisional ballots then?

12:44 Michael McDonald: Provisional ballots are required under federal law to allow people to vote if there is a problem with their voter registration. Election officials work after the election to resolve the situation.

If you vote in-person early, then you can resolve provisional ballot situations much sooner, which is good.

12:45 Michael McDonald: Some states use provisional ballots for other purposes: e.g., for a person who does not have the required id or to manage a change in voter registration address. One of the untold stories of this cycle is that FL will manage change of reg. address through provisional ballots. OH does so, and 200K provisionals were cast in 2008. Expect 300K in FL, which may mean we will not know the outcome in FL until weeks after the election. Can you say 2000?

12:45 Comment from Mark, Greenbelt: Is early voting a new phenomenon, or is it increasing? It seems we should make it easier for people to vote when they can.

12:46 Michael McDonald: We are seeing more people vote early, particularly in states that offer the option. However, only MD changed its law from 2008 to allow in-person early voting. OH is sending absentee ballot requests to all registered voters, which is not a change in law, but a change in procedure that is expected to significantly increase early voting there.

12:47 Comment from Jennifer S. : Why do we vote on Tuesday? It seems inconvenient. Wouldn't more people vote if we did it on the weekend? Or over a period of days that offered both morning and evening hours?

12:48 Michael McDonald: We used to have early voting in the US! Back at the Founding, elections were held over several days to allow people living in remote areas to get to the courthouse (the polling place back in the day) to vote. In the mid-1840s, the federal gov't set the current single day for voting because -- what else? -- claims of vote fraud. That people could vote more than once.

12:49 Comment from Winston: What percentage of the U.S. population votes? And, if you could make one change that would increase voting in the U.S. what would be?

12:50 Michael McDonald: I also calculate turnout rates for the country for the media and academics. 62.2% of the eligible voters cast a ballot that counted in 2008. If I were to wave a magic wand, I would have election day registration. California just adopted it yesterday (but starting 2015). States with EDR have +5-7 percentage points of turnout.

12:50 Comment from Bernie S.: One of your colleagues at Brookings, Bill Galston, has suggested that we make voting mandatory, as they do in Australia. What do you think of that idea? Is it even possible here?

12:51 Michael McDonald: That will never happen in a county that values individual freedom so deeply as the US. Fun fact: a few years back, AZ voters rejected a ballot initiative to have voters entered into a lottery.

12:51 Comment from James: If early voting becomes more and more common, shouldn't candidates start campaigning earlier?

12:53 Michael McDonald: They do. In fact, you will see the presidential candidates visit battleground states that have in-person early voting at the start of the period. In 2008, you could see how early voting increased in places where Obama held rallies.

12:53 Comment from Devi P. : What are the factors that drive turnout? How do we get people to the polls? And what can you say about the "microtargeting" strategies the political parties are using to get their voters out?

12:54 Michael McDonald: One of the major ways in which elections have changed in the past decade is that campaigns now place more effort into voter contacts. Over 50% of people reported a contact in 2008. These contacts are known to increase turnout rates by upwards of 10 percentage points. Even contacts from Facebook friends seems to matter!

12:54 Comment from Wendy P, Ohio: What's your position on electronic voting? Can't every voting machine be hacked? Isn't plain old paper balloting more secure?

12:56 Michael McDonald: I went to Caltech, so I am sensitive to the potential for hacking. That said, I encourage experimentation so that we can build a better system. There are counties that do hold electronic elections!

12:56 Comment from Leslie: 400,000 seems like a lot - does this actually have impact on the electoral votes, and if so, should we be worried in this coming election that a lengthy recall may occur?

12:57 Michael McDonald: It could affect the outcome. So please spread the word through your networks. This is the #1 way in which votes are lost in the system!

12:57 Comment from JVotes: Perhaps we should microtarget with ballot issues. Many Americans seem disappointed with the two candidates we have to choose from.

12:58 Michael McDonald: Actually, ballot issues are known to increase turnout. But only a small amount in a presidential election, about 1 percentage point. People vote in the main show: the presidential election.

12:58 Michael McDonald: Interesting aside on that: early voting seems to have a small turnout effect in presidential election, but a larger effect in state and local elections.

12:58 Comment from Jaime Ravenet: Is there a reading of the new voter ID requirements (in at least the 9 most contested states) that does not constitute an "abridgment" of citizens' voting rights?

1:00 Michael McDonald: Perhaps under state constitutions. But the US Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of Indiana's id law. Still, that does not mean that lawyers will try to find some way under federal law to overturn them. TX was blocked because their law was determined to be discriminatory, per Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

1:00 Vivyan Tran: Thanks for the questions everyone, see you next week!

       

       

       

On March 4, President Obama submitted to Congress his 2015 budget request. Keeping with the spending cap deal agreed last December with Congress, the level of federal R&D will remain flat; and, when discounted by inflation, it is slightly lower. The requested R&D amount for 2015 is $135.4 billion, only $1.7 billion greater than 2014. If we discount from this 1.2% increase the expected inflation of 1.7% we are confronting a 0.5% decline in real terms.

Reaction of the Research Community

The litany of complaints has started. The President’s Science and Technology Advisor, John Holdren said to AAAS: “This budget required a lot of tough choices. All of us would have preferred more." The Association of American Universities, representing 60 top research universities, put out a statement declaring that this budget does “disappointingly little to close the nation’s innovation deficit,” so defined by the gap between the appropriate level of R&D investment and current spending.

What’s more, compared to 2014, the budget request has kept funding for scientific research roughly even but it has reallocated about $250 million from basic to applied research (see Table 1). Advocates of science have voiced their discontent. Take for instance the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology that has called the request a “disappointment to the research community” because the President’s budget came $2.5 billion short of their recommendations.

The President’s Research and Development Budget 2015

Source: OMB Budget 2015

These complaints are fully expected and even justified: each interest group must defend their share of tax-revenues. Sadly, in times of austerity, these protestations are toothless. If they were to have any traction in claiming a bigger piece of the federal discretionary pie, advocates would have to make a comparative case showing what budget lines must go down to make room for more R&D. But that line of argumentation could mean suicide for the scientific community because it would throw it into direct political contest with other interests and such contests are rarely decided by the merits of the cause but by the relative political power of interest groups. The science lobby is better off issuing innocuous hortatory pronouncements rather than picking up political fights that it cannot win.

Thus, the R&D slice is to remain pegged to the size of the total budget, which is not expected to grow, in the coming years, more than bonsai. The political accident of budget constraints is bound to change the scientific enterprise from within, not only in terms of the articulation of merits—which means more precise and compelling explanations for the relative importance of disciplines and programs—but also in terms of a shrewd political contest among science factions.

      

Innovation is the driver of long-term economic growth and a key ingredient for improvements in healthcare, safety, and security, not to mention those little comforts and conveniences to which we have grown so accustomed. But innovation is not an unqualified good; it taxes society with costs.

The market system internalizes only a portion of the total costs of innovation. Other costs, however, are not included in market prices. Among the most important sources for those unaccounted costs are creative destruction, externalities, and weak safeguards for unwanted consequences.

Creative Destruction and Innovation

Schumpeter described creative destruction as the process by which innovative entrepreneurs outcompete older firms who unable to adapt to a new productive platform go out of business, laying off their employees and writing off their productive assets. Innovation, thus, also produces job loss and wealth destruction. Externalities are side effects with costs not priced in the marketplace such as environmental degradation and pollution. While externalities are largely invisible in the accounting books, they levy very real costs to society in terms of human health and increased vulnerability to environmental shocks. In addition, new technologies are bound to have unwanted deleterious effects, some of which are harmful to workers and consumers, and often, even to third parties not participating in those markets. Yet, there are little financial or cultural incentives for innovators to design new technologies with safeguards against those effects.

Indeed, innovation imposes unaccounted costs and those costs are not allocated in proportion of the benefits. Nothing in the market system obligates the winners of creative destruction to compensate the unemployed of phased-out industries, nor mandates producers to compensate those shouldering the costs of externalities, nor places incentives to invest in preventing unwanted effects in new production processes and new products. It is the role of policy to create the appropriate incentives for a fair distribution of those social costs. As a matter of national policy we must continue every effort to foster innovation, but we must do so recognizing the trade-offs.

Strengthening the Social Safety Net

Society as a whole benefits from creative destruction; society as a whole must then strengthen the safety net for the unemployed and double up efforts to help workers retrain and find employment in emerging industries. Regulators and industry will always disagree on many things but they could agree to collaborate on a system of regulatory incentives to ease transition to productive platforms with low externality costs. Fostering innovation should also mean promoting a culture of anticipation to better manage unwanted consequences.

Let’s invest in innovation with optimism, but let’s be pragmatic about it. To reap the most net social benefit from innovation, we must work on two fronts, to maximize benefits and to minimize the social costs, particularly those costs not traditionally accounted. The challenge for policymakers is to do it fairly and smartly, creating a correspondence of benefits and costs, and not unnecessarily encumbering innovative activity.

Commentary published in The International Economy magazine, Spring 2014 issue, as part of a symposium of experts responding to the question: Does Innovation Lead to prosperity for all?

      

Technical change is advancing at a breakneck speed while the institutions that govern innovative activity slog forward trying to keep pace. The lag has created a need for reform in the governance of innovation. Reformers who focus primarily on the social benefits of innovation propose to unmoor the innovative forces of the market. Conversely, those who deal mostly with innovation’s social costs wish to constrain it by introducing regulations in advance of technological developments. In this paper, Walter Valdivia and David Guston argue for a different approach to reform the governance of innovation that they call "Responsible Innovation" because it seeks to imbue in the actors of the innovation system a more robust sense of individual and collective responsibility.

Responsible innovation appreciates the power of free markets in organizing innovation and realizing social expectations but is self-conscious about the social costs that markets do not internalize. At the same time, the actions it recommends do not seek to slow down innovation because they do not constrain the set of options for researchers and businesses, they expand it. Responsible innovation is not a doctrine of regulation and much less an instantiation of the precautionary principle. Innovation and society can evolve down several paths and the path forward is to some extent open to collective choice. The aim of a responsible governance of innovation is to make that choice more consonant with democratic principles.

Valdivia and Guston illustrate how responsible innovation can be implemented with three practical initiatives: 

1. Industry: Incorporating values and motivations to innovation decisions that go beyond the profit motive could help industry take on a long-view of those decisions and better manage its own costs associated with liability and regulation, while reducing the social cost of negative externalities. Consequently, responsible innovation should be an integral part of corporate social responsibility, considering that the latter has already become part of the language of business, from the classroom to the board room, and that is effectively shaping, in some quarters, corporate policies and decisions.
2. Universities and National Laboratories: Centers for Responsible Innovation, fashioned after the institutional reform of Internal Review Boards to protect human subjects in research and the Offices of Technology Transfer created to commercialize academic research, could organize existing responsible innovation efforts at university and laboratory campuses. These Centers would formalize the consideration of impacts of research proposals on legal and regulatory frameworks, economic opportunity and inequality, sustainable development and the environment, as well as ethical questions beyond the integrity of research subjects.
3. Federal Government: Federal policy should improve its protections and support of scientific research while providing mechanisms of public accountability for research funding agencies and their contractors. Demanding a return on investment for every research grant is a misguided approach that devalues research and undermines trust between Congress and the scientific community. At the same time, scientific institutions and their advocates should improve public engagement and demonstrate their willingness and ability to be responsive to societal concerns and expectations about the public research agenda. Second, if scientific research is a public good, by definition, markets are not effective commercializing it. New mechanisms to develop practical applications from federal research with little market appeal should be introduced to counterbalance the emphasis the current technology transfer system places on research ready for the market. Third, federal innovation policy needs to be better coordinated with other federal policy, including tax, industrial, and trade policy as well as regulatory regimes. It should also improve coordination with initiatives at the local and state level to improve the outcomes of innovation for each region, state, and metro area.

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NASA’s Asteroid Initiative encompasses efforts for the human exploration of asteroids—as well as the Asteroid Grand Challenge—to enhance asteroid detection capabilities and mitigate their threat to Earth. The human space flight portion of the initiative primarily includes the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which is a proposal to put an asteroid in orbit of the moon and send astronauts to it. The program originally contemplated two alternatives for closer study: capturing a small 10m diameter asteroid versus simply recovering a boulder from a much larger asteroid. Late in March, NASA offered an update of its plans. It has decided to retrieve a boulder from an asteroid near Earth’s orbit—candidates are the asteroids 2008 EV5, Bennu, and Itokawa—and will place the boulder on the moon’s orbit to further study it.

This mission will help NASA develop a host of technical capabilities. For instance, Solar Electric Propulsion uses solar electric power to charge atoms for spacecraft propulsion—in the absence of gravity, even a modicum of force can alter the trajectory of a body in outer space. Another related capability under development is the gravity tractor, which is based on the notion that even the modest mass of a spacecraft can exert sufficient gravitational force over an asteroid to ever so slightly change its orbit. The ARM spacecraft mass could be further increased by its ability to capture a boulder from the asteroid that is steering clear of the Earth, enabling a test of how humans might prevent asteroid threats in the future. Thus, NASA will have a second test of how to deflect near-Earth objects on a hazardous trajectory. The first test, implemented as part of the Deep Impact Mission, is a kinetic impactor; that is, crashing a spacecraft on an approaching object to change its trajectory.

The Asteroid Initiative is a partner of the agency’s Near Earth Object Observation (NEOO) program. The goal of this program is to discover and monitor space objects traveling on a trajectory that could pose the risk of hitting Earth with catastrophic effects. The program also seeks to develop mitigation strategies. The capabilities developed by ARM could also support other programs of NASA, such as the manned exploration of Mars.

NEOO has recently enjoyed an uptick of public support. It used to be funded at about $4 million in the 1990s and in 2010 was allocated a paltry $6 million. But then, a redirection of priorities—linked to the transition from the Bush to the Obama administrations—increased funding for NEOO to about $20 million in 2012 and $40 million in 2014—and NASA is seeking $50 million for 2015. It is clear that NASA officials made a compelling case for the importance of NEOO; in fact, what they are asking seems quite a modest amount if indeed asteroids pose an existential risk to life on earth. At the same time, the instrumental importance of the program and the public funds devoted to it beg the question as to whether taxpayers should have a say in the decisions NASA is making regarding how to proceed with the program.

NASA has done something remarkable to help answer this question.

Last November, NASA partnered with the ECAST network (Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology) to host a citizen forum assessing the Asteroid Initiative. ECAST is a consortium of science policy and advocacy organizations which specializes in citizen deliberations on science policy. The forum consisted of a dialogue with 100 citizens in Phoenix and Boston who learned more about the asteroid initiative and then commented on various aspects of the project.

The participants, who were selected to approximate the demographics of the U.S. population, were asked to assess mitigation strategies to protect against asteroids. They were introduced to four strategies: civil defense, gravity tractor, kinetic impactor, and nuclear blast deflection. As part of the deliberations, they were asked to consider the two aforementioned approaches to perform ARM. A consensus emerged about the boulder retrieval option primarily because citizens thought that option offered better prospects for developing planetary defense technologies.  This preference existed despite the excitement of capturing a full asteroid, which could potentially have additional economic impacts. The participants showed interest in promoting the development of mitigation capabilities at least as much as they wanted to protect traditional NASA goals such as the advancement of science and space flight technology. This is not surprising given that concerns about doomsday should reasonably take precedence over traditional research and exploration concerns.

NASA could have decided to set ARM along the path of boulder retrieval exclusively on technical merits, but having conducted a citizen forum, the agency is now able to claim that this decision is also socially robust, which is to say, is responsive to public values of consensus. In this manner, NASA has shown a promising method by which research mission federal agencies can increase their public accountability.

In the same spirit of responsible research and innovation, a recent Brookings paper I authored with David Guston—who is a co-founder of ECAST—proposes a number of other innovative ways in which the innovation enterprise can be made more responsive to public values and social expectations.

Kudos to NASA for being at the forefront of innovation in space exploration and public accountability.

      

The fiscal budget has become a casualty of political polarization and even functions that had enjoyed bipartisan support, like research and development (R&D), are becoming divisive issues on Capitol Hill. As a result, federal R&D is likely to grow pegged to inflation or worse, decline.

With the size of the pie fixed or shrinking, requests for R&D funding increases will trigger an inter-agency zero-sum game that will play out as pointless comparisons of agencies’ merit, or worse, as a contest to attract the favor of Congress or the White House. This insidious politics will be made even more so by the growing tendency of equating public accountability with the measurement of performance. Political polarization, tight budgets, and pressure for quantifiable results threaten to undermine the sustainability of public R&D. The situation begs the question: What can federal agencies do to deal with the changing politics of federal R&D?

In a new paper, Walter D. Valdivia and Benjamin Y. Clark apply punctuated equilibrium theory to examine the last four decades of federal R&D, both at the aggregate and the agency level. Valdivia and Clark observe a general upward trend driven by gradual increases. In turn, budget leaps or punctuations are few and far in between and do no appear to have lasting effects. As the politics of R&D are stirred up, federal departments and agencies are sure to find that proposing punctuations is becoming more costly and risky. Consequently, agencies will be well advised in securing stable growth in their R&D budgets in the long run rather than pushing for short term budget leaps.

While appropriations history would suggest the stability of R&D spending resulted from the character of the budget politics, in the future, stability will need the stewardship of R&D champions who work to institutionalize gradualism, this time, in spite of the politics.

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International development debates of the last four decades have ascribed ever greater importance to intellectual property rights (IPRs). There has also been a significant effort on the part of the U.S. to encourage its trade partners to introduce and enforce patent law modeled after American intellectual property law. Aside from a discussion on the impact of patents on innovation, there are some important consequences of international harmonization regarding the obduracy of the terms of trade agreements.

The position of the State Department on patents when negotiating trade agreements has consistently been one of defending stronger patent protection. However, the high-tech sector is under reorganization, and the most innovative industries today have strong disagreements about the value of patents for innovation. This situation begs the question as to why the national posture on patent law is so consistent in favor of industries such as pharmaceuticals or biotech to the detriment of software developers and Internet-based companies.

The State Department defends this posture, arguing that the U.S. has a comparative advantage in sectors dependent on patent protection. Therefore, to promote exports, our national trade policy should place incentives for partners to come in line with national patent law. This posture will become problematic when America’s competitive advantage shifts to sectors that find patents to be a hindrance to innovation, because too much effort will have already been invested in twisting the arm of our trade partners. It will be hard to undo those chapters in trade agreements particularly after our trade partners have taken pains in passing laws aligned to American law.

Related to the previous concern, the policy inertia effect and inflexibility applies to domestic policy as much as it does to trade agreements. When other nations adopt policy regimes following the American model, advocates of stronger patent protection will use international adoption as an argument in favor of keeping the domestic policy status quo. The pressure we place on our trade partners to strengthen patent protection (via trade agreements and other mechanisms like the Special 301 Report) will be forgotten. Advocates will present those trade partners as having adopted the enlightened laws of the U.S., and ask why American lawmakers would wish to change law that inspires international emulation. Innovation scholar Timothy Simcoe has correctly suggested that harmonization creates inflexibility in domestic policy. Indeed, in a not-too-distant future the rapid transformation of the economy, new big market players, and emerging business models may give policymakers the feeling that we are stuck in a patent policy rut whose usefulness has expired.

In addition, there are indirect economic effects from projecting national patent law onto trade agreements. If we assume that a club of economies (such as OECD) generate most of the innovation worldwide while the rest of countries simply adopt new technologies, the innovation club would have control over the global supply of high value-added goods and services and be able to preserve a terms-of-trade advantage. In this scenario, stronger patent protection may be in the interest of the innovation club to the extent that their competitive advantage remains in industries dependent of patent protection. But should the world economic order change and the innovation club become specialized in digital services while the rest of the world takes on larger segments of manufactures, the advantage may shift outside the innovation club. This is not a far-fetched scenario. Emerging economies have increased their service economy in addition to their manufacturing capacity; overall they are better integrated in global supply chains. What is more, these emerging economies are growing consumption markets that will become increasingly more relevant globally as they continue to grow faster than rich economies.

What is more, the innovation club will not likely retain a monopoly on global innovation for too long. Within emerging economies, another club of economies is placing great investments in developing innovative capacity. In particular, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa (and possibly Russia) have strengthened their innovation systems by expanding public investments in R&D and introducing institutional reforms to foster entrepreneurship. The innovation of this second club may, in a world of harmonized patent law, increase their competitive advantage by securing monopolistic control of key high-tech markets. As industries less reliant on patents flourish and the digital economy transforms US markets, an inflexibly patent policy regime may actually be detrimental to American terms of trade.

I should stress that these kind of political and economic effects of America’s posture on IPRs in trade policy are not merely speculative. Just as manufactures displaced the once dominant agricultural sector, and services in turn took over as the largest sector of the economy, we can fully expect that the digital economy—with its preference for limited use of patents—will become not only more economic relevant, but also more politically influential. The tensions observed in international trade and especially the aforementioned considerations merit revisiting the rationale for America’s posture on intellectual property policy in trade negotiations.

Elsie Bjarnason contributed to this post.

       

       

Editors' Note: How can the U.S. government better counter ISIS propaganda? As the State Department overhauls its counter messaging program, Will McCants and Clint Watts examine what makes ISIS’s online magazine, Dabiq, so successful, and the obstacles to the U.S. government producing a publication that effective. This piece originally appeared on The Daily Beast.

The Obama administration attributes much of ISIS’s success at communicating to its technological savvy, which has elevated the group to a global media and terrorist phenomenon. The president has gone so far as to say that the Paris attackers were a “bunch of killers with good social media.”

Despite the praise heaped on the so-called Islamic State for its cutting-edge propaganda online, one of its most effective products is decidedly low tech. Dabiq, ISIS’s online news magazine, has a small but devoted readership that spans the globe. News of advances on the battlefield excite them—more evidence that God’s kingdom on earth has returned and grows. Stories of fighters inspire them—more models to emulate as they contemplate what role they can play in the divine drama unfolding.

Journalists and analysts read it with almost the same intensity as ISIS fans; the contents of each volume fill newspapers and think-tank reports soon after it’s released. And no wonder: the magazine clearly states the organization’s goals; provides news of its activities that advance those goals; showcases personal stories of the people engaged in the activities; and announces major developments in the organization’s fight against its enemies. It’s a wealth of information presented between two covers every few months.

Can you name a single U.S. government publication or online platform devoted to the anti-ISIS fight that is as informative or as widely-read as Dabiq? Is there anything that tells us what all these air sorties are for? Who’s fighting this fight on the ground? What advances the coalition has made and why we should we care? We couldn’t come up with one either.

That got us to thinking: why can’t the U.S. government publish something like Dabiq online? Lack of imagination isn’t the reason. A news magazine isn’t a very creative idea—Americans perfected the form, which ISIS copied. And if anything, folks inside the government have too many overly-imaginative ideas, most of them involving whiz-bang technology. If you’ve thought it, they’ve thought it. A social media campaign for youth to come up with ways to counter violent extremism? Check. Sock-puppetry? Check.

The only real obstacle impeding the U.S. government is itself. The executive branch’s complicated bureaucracy, legal strictures, and sensitivity to criticism from media and Congress make it tough to publish a Dabiq-style magazine. To see what we mean, let’s look at two of Dabiq’s regular features and see what would happen if the U.S. government tried to mimic them:

Attack Reports: Each issue of Dabiq details its attacks on its enemies. One entry in issue 12 chronicled ISIS’s efforts to capture an airbase in Dayr al-Zawr, Syria. Another described four suicide attacks on the Saudi-led coalition fighting southern Yemen. Pictures accompany most entries, some quite gruesome.

The U.S. government routinely writes these types of reports for internal consumption. But when they’re public—and thus under the scrutiny of Congress that holds the pursestrings and the media that holds the careerstrings—routine gives way to caution and quarreling.

If the president asks his government to write attack reports for the public, the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense will quarrel about who will take the lead in writing and publishing them. Then they and the intelligence agencies will quarrel over which reports should be included. Will this report counter the president’s insistence that we have no boots on the ground? Will that report make it look like our Iraqi partners aren’t carrying their weight? Does this one tell the enemy too much about our game plan? Does that picture make U.S. soldiers look too menacing? Will this report later be discredited by the media? Will these battlefield successes be reversed in the future? Does anyone know if another agency has said this or its opposite? Will anyone trust what we’re saying? Shouldn’t someone else be saying this?

When something finally slides off the serpentine conveyor belt months later, it will be a bland blob devoid of detail and relevance. Meanwhile, ISIS will have added twelve more volumes to its shelves.

Biographies of Fighters: Dabiq sometimes profiles its fighters, including the young men on the front lines dying for ISIS’s cause. The fighters tell their stories and explain their reasons for fighting. In issue 8, for example, there is a Q&A with the man who murdered a prominent politician in Tunisia. He explains why he did it and how it advances the greater goals of the Islamic State.

The United States military used to feature these sorts of stories, too—back when the American war in Iraq was a massive, overt affair. Now, that’s not the case. The identities of the Americans fighting in Syria and Iraq are a well-guarded secret because the government does not want them or their families to become targets. The government would also frown on them for nonchalantly talking about killing lest the American public get upset. And then there’s that boots on the ground thing.

Without personal stories, we’re left with drones buzzing in the sky, and buzz-cut officers droning through stale Pentagon briefings. The human cost on both sides is reduced to numbers on slides, which means Americans can’t appreciate the true costs of war and foreigners can’t appreciate the sacrifices Americans are making on their behalf.

Some readers might feel that the U.S. government should be constrained in these ways. They want the government to be sensitive to public opinion and exceedingly cautious when talking about war and violence. If so, they shouldn’t complain when the U.S. government explains its anti-ISIS fight in the vaguest possible terms—that’s the outcome of extreme caution compounded by bureaucratic bargaining on a mind-boggling scale. Others might feel we need to reform the way government does messaging. If so, don’t propose to change the system first. Rather, ask the system to perform a simple task like the one we’ve described and see where it breaks down. Then you’ll know what to fix.

Making a news magazine probably isn’t the high tech solution the government is looking for, at least judging by Friday’s pilgrimage of senior security officials to Silicon Valley and the revamping of State Department’s online counter messaging campaign. But if our byzantine, poll-sensitive government can’t do something so basic, it won’t perform better when it’s tasked with something more complicated no matter how much technology it uses.

      

Editors’ Note: The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadis pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. Research by Will McCants and Chris Meserole reveals that French political culture may play a role. This post originally appeared in Foreign Affairs.

The mass-casualty terrorist attacks in Paris and now in Brussels underscore an unsettling truth: Jihadists pose a greater threat to France and Belgium than to the rest of Europe. The body counts are larger and the disrupted plots are more numerous. The trend might be explained by the nature of the Islamic State (ISIS) networks in Europe or as failures of policing in France and Belgium. Both explanations have merit. However, our research reveals that another factor may be at play: French political culture.

Last fall, we began a project to test empirically the many proposed explanations for Sunni militancy around the globe. The goal was to take common measures of the violence—namely, the number of Sunni foreign fighters from any given country as well as the number of Sunni terror attacks carried out within it—and then crunch the numbers to see which explanations best predicted a country’s rate of Sunni radicalization and violence. (The raw foreign fighter data came from The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence; the original attack data came from the University of Maryland’s START project.)

What we found surprised us, particularly when it came to foreign fighter radicalization. It turns out that the best predictor of foreign fighter radicalization was not a country’s wealth. Nor was it how well-educated its citizens were, how healthy they were, or even how much Internet access they enjoyed. Instead, the top predictor was whether a country was Francophone; that is, whether it currently lists (or previously listed) French as a national language. As strange as it may seem, four of the five countries with the highest rates of radicalization in the world are Francophone, including the top two in Europe (France and Belgium).

Knowledgeable readers will immediately object that the raw numbers tell a different story. The English-speaking United Kingdom, for example, has produced far more foreign fighters than French-speaking Belgium. And fighters from Saudi Arabia number in the several thousands. But the raw numbers are misleading. If you view the foreign fighters as a percentage of the overall Muslim population, you see a different picture. Per Muslim resident, Belgium produces far more foreign fighters than either the United Kingdom or Saudi Arabia. 

[W]hat could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture.

So what could the language of love possibly have to do with Islamist violence? We suspect that it is really a proxy for something else: French political culture. The French approach to secularism is more aggressive than, say, the British approach. France and Belgium, for example, are the only two countries in Europe to ban the full veil in their public schools. They’re also the only two countries in Western Europe not to gain the highest rating for democracy in the well-known Polity score data, which does not include explanations for the markdowns.

Adding support to this story are the top interactions we found between different variables. When you look at which combination of variables is most predictive, it turns out that the “Francophone effect” is actually strongest in the countries that are most developed: French-speaking countries with the highest literacy, best infrastructure, and best health system. This is not a story about French colonial plunder. If anything it’s a story about what happens when French economic and political development has most deeply taken root.

An important subplot within this story concerns the distribution of wealth. In particular, the rate of youth unemployment and urbanization appear to matter a great deal too. Globally, we found that when between 10 and 30 percent of a country’s youth are unemployed, there is a strong relationship between a rise in youth unemployment and a rise in Sunni militancy. Rates outside that range don’t have an effect. Likewise, when urbanization is between 60 and 80 percent, there is a strong relationship.

These findings seem to matter most in Francophone countries. Among the over 1,000 interactions our model looked at, those between Francophone and youth unemployment and Francophone and urbanization both ranked among the 15 most predictive. There’s broad anecdotal support for this idea: consider the rampant radicalization in Molenbeek, in the Parisbanlieus, in Ben Gardane. Each of these contexts have produced a massively disproportionate share of foreign fighters, and each are also urban pockets with high youth unemployment.

As with the Francophone finding overall, we’re left with guesswork as to why exactly the relationships between French politics, urbanization, youth unemployment, and Sunni militancy exist. We suspect that when there are large numbers of unemployed youth, some of them are bound to get up to mischief. When they live in large cities, they have more opportunities to connect with people espousing radical causes. And when those cities are in Francophone countries that adopt the strident French approach to secularism, Sunni radicalism is more appealing.

For now, the relationship needs to be studied and tested by comparing several cases in countries and between countries. We also found other interesting relationships—such as between Sunni violence and prior civil conflict—but they are neither as strong nor as compelling.

Regardless, the latest attacks in Belgium are reason enough to share the initial findings. They may be way off, but at least they are based on the best available data. If the data is wrong or our interpretations skewed, we hope the effort will lead to more rigorous explanations of what is driving jihadist terrorism in Europe. Our initial findings should in no way imply that Francophone countries are responsible for the recent horrible attacks—no country deserves to have its civilians killed, regardless of the perpetrator’s motives. But the magnitude of the violence and the fear it engenders demand that we investigate those motives beyond just the standard boilerplate explanations.

       

       

Last night, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn addressed the Republican convention as a headline speaker on the subject of national security. One of Donald Trump’s closest advisors—so much so that he was considered for vice president—Flynn repeated many of the themes found in his new book, The Field of Fight, How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, which he coauthored with Michael Ledeen. (The book is published by St. Martin’s, which also published mine.)

Written in Flynn’s voice, the book advances two related arguments: First, the U.S. government does not know enough about its enemies because it does not collect enough intelligence, and it refuses to take ideological motivations seriously. Second, our enemies are collaborating in an “international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy” the United States despite their ideological differences.

Readers will immediately notice a tension between the two ideas. “On the surface,” Flynn admits, “it seems incoherent.” He asks: 

“How can a Communist regime like North Korea embrace a radical Islamist regime like Iran? What about Russia’s Vladimir Putin? He is certainly no jihadi; indeed, Russia has a good deal to fear from radical Islamist groups.” 

Flynn spends much of the book resolving the contradiction and proving that America’s enemies—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and ISIS—are in fact working in concert.

No one who has read classified intelligence or studied international relations will balk at the idea that unlikely friendships are formed against a common enemy. As Flynn observes, the revolutionary Shiite government in Tehran cooperates with nationalist Russia and communist North Korea; it has also turned a blind eye (at the very least) to al-Qaida’s Sunni operatives in Iran and used them bargaining chips when negotiating with Osama bin Laden and the United States. 

Flynn argues that this is more than “an alliance of convenience.” Rather, the United States’ enemies share “a contempt for democracy and an agreement—by all the members of the enemy alliance—that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate.” Their shared goals of maximizing dictatorship and minimizing U.S. interference override their substantial ideological differences. Consequently, the U.S. government must work to destroy the alliance by “removing the sickening chokehold of tyranny, dictatorships, and Radical Islamist regimes.” Its failure to do so over the past decades gravely imperils the United States, he contends.

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen...[P]erhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy.

Some of Flynn’s evidence for the alliance diverts into the conspiratorial—I’ve seen nothing credible to back up his assertion that the Iranians were behind the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni apocalypticists. And there’s an important difference between the territorially-bounded ambitions of Iran, Russia, and North Korea, on the one hand, and ISIS’s desire to conquer the world on the other; the former makes alliances of convenience easier than the latter. Still, Flynn would basically be a neocon if he stuck with his core argument: tyrannies of all stripes are arrayed against the United States so the United States should destroy them.

But some tyrannies are less worthy of destruction than others. In fact, Flynn argues there’s a category of despot that should be excluded from his principle, the “friendly tyrants” like President Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi in Egypt and former president Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Saddam Hussein should not have been toppled, Flynn argues, and even Russia could become an “ideal partner for fighting Radical Islam” if only it would come to its senses about the threat of “Radical Islam.” Taken alone, these arguments would make Flynn realist, not a neocon. 

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen. Neither is a sure path to security. Spreading democracy through the wrong means can bring to power regimes that are even more hostile and authoritarian; standing with strongmen risks the same. Absent some principle higher than just democracy or security for their own sakes, the reader is unable to decide between Flynn’s contradictory perspectives and judge when their benefits are worth the risks. 

It’s strange to find a book about strategy so at odds with itself. Perhaps the dissonance is due to the co-authors’ divergent views (Ledeen is a neocon and Flynn is comfortable dining with Putin.) Or perhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy. Whatever the case, the muddled argument offered in The Field of Fight demonstrates how hard it is to overcome ideological differences to ally against a common foe, regardless of whether that alliance is one of convenience or conviction. 

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

For Europe, it has been a rough year, or perhaps more accurately a rough decade. The terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, and elsewhere have taken a toll, as did the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But things really got tough beginning with the Great Recession—and its prolonged duration for Europe, including grave economic crises in much of the southern part of the continent. That was followed by Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, as well as the intensification of the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni conflicts with their tragic human consequences, including massive displacement of people and the greatest flow of refugees since World War II. The recent attacks in Paris and Brussels have added to the gloom and fear. This recent history, together with the advent of nationalistic and inward-looking policies in virtually all European Union member states, makes it easy to get despondent—and worry that the entire European project is failing.

To be sure, these are not the best of times. Europe is perceived by some, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as failing to invest enough in its own security, since NATO allies spend less than 1.4 percent of GDP on their armed forces while the United States spends twice that. However, we must not lose sight of the key structural advantages—and the important policy successes—that have brought Europe where it is today. For example, Europe’s recent progress in energy policy has been significant—good not only for economic and energy resilience, but also for NATO's collective handling of the revanchist Russia threat. 

[W]e must not lose sight of the key structural advantages—and the important policy successes—that have brought Europe where it is today.

For many years, analysts and policymakers have debated the question of Europe's dependence on natural gas from Russia. Today, this problem is largely solved. Russia provides only one-third of Europe’s gas. Importantly, Europe’s internal infrastructure for transporting natural gas in all desired directions has improved greatly. So have its available storage options, as well as its possibilities to import alternatives either by pipeline or in the form of liquefied natural gas. As a result, almost all member states are currently well-positioned to withstand even a worst-case scenario. 

Indeed, European Commission analyses show that even a multi-month long supply disruption could be addressed, albeit at real economic cost, by diversification and fuel switching. Progress in energy efficiency and renewable energy investments also help. There is more to do to enhance European energy security, but much has been done already. The Europeans have shown that, with ups and downs, they can address energy security themselves.

Already this energy success has contributed to a strategic success. Europe has been heavily criticized for not standing up more firmly to Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine. In fact, all EU member states have agreed to keep economic sanctions in place against Moscow. In addition, lifting the sanctions has been firmly attached to the implementation of the Minsk II agreement—and despite recent cracks in European solidarity, we hope that this stance will hold going forward. 

The notion that Europe is weak and dependent on Russian natural gas is a relic from the past.

The notion that Europe is weak and dependent on Russian natural gas is a relic from the past. Europe has a strong regulatory framework with which commercial entities, including Gazprom, have to abide. For those who doubt the impact of these regulations, just ask Google or Microsoft. With the end of so-called destination clauses, natural gas can be re-sold whenever required, as long as sufficient infrastructure is in place. Just last year, Germany re-exported over 30 billion cubic meters of gas, mostly Russian, in particular to Central and Eastern Europe (including Ukraine). That volume exceeds the annual consumption of every European state with the exceptions of Germany, Italy, France, and Britain.

In theory, Europe could even substantially wean itself off Russian gas if need be. To be sure, that would come at a major expense: over 200 billion euros of additional investments over a period of two years or more, and then an annual 35 billion euros, according to some calculations. That will almost surely not happen. But as a way of bounding the worst-case scenario, it is still informative. One might say that Europe has escalation dominance over Russia; the latter needs to export to Europe more than Europe need Russian hydrocarbons.

The internal energy market is not finished, but Europe’s energy security has significantly improved in recent years. Even though world markets are currently awash in resources, there is no time for complacence, and European leaders should finish the job, foremost by safeguarding the swift construction of the so-called Projects of Common Interest (key energy infrastructure projects that address the remaining bottlenecks in the EU market), so that the U.S. State Department can take new infrastructure projects like Nord Stream 2 off its priority list, and make energy policy another true European success story. It is already much of the way there, and Western security is the better for it.

      

Editors’ Note: Trump’s explanation of the economics of America’s security alliances misses several core realities, argues Michael O’Hanlon. The benefits of certain alliances can be debated—but they hardly constitute the wholesale drain on American coffers that he has made them out to be. This article was originally published on The National Interest.

In his April 27 foreign-policy speech in Washington, Donald Trump leveled a number of critiques at U.S. allies around the world. He began to flesh out his now-familiar critiques of how America’s many allies and security partners—which number about sixty around the world—fail to do their fair share for the common defense.

It is only fair to acknowledge that some of Trump’s arguments about military burden sharing have merit. Most notably, America dramatically outspends most allies on its armed forces. Of course, the United States has the largest economy of any Western ally and thus, rather naturally, the largest defense budget by far. But relative to GDP, its contributions are still disproportionate. The United States spends about 3 percent of gross domestic product on its military. NATO allies are pledged to devote 2 percent of GDP each to their armed forces, but the alliance average is less than 1.4 percent. Only the UK, France, Poland, Greece, and Estonia are near or above 2 percent. Germany is at just 1.1 percent of GDP; Italy and the Netherlands and Turkey check in at 1.2 percent; Belgium and Canada do not even reach 1.0 percent. Yes, some of these countries contribute impressively—more than the United States does, relative to national economic strength—in areas such as development assistance and refugee receptivity, but Trump still has a fair point on this basic and important measure of military preparedness.

On balance, however, Trump’s explanation of the economics of America’s security alliances misses several core realities. The benefits of certain alliances can be debated—but they hardly constitute the wholesale drain on American coffers that he has made them out to be.

Trump’s explanation of the economics of America’s security alliances misses several core realities.

First and foremost, counting the United States as well, the broad coalition of U.S.-led Western alliances accounts for some two-thirds of world GDP and two-thirds of global military spending. This situation is exceedingly advantageous to America. Never before in history has such a powerful strategic block of countries been created, especially in the absence of a clear central threat. Of course, America’s allies do not always do as it would wish. But today’s situation is far better than having two or more rivalrous groups of strong countries jostling for position with each other, and potentially engaging in arms races or open conflict.

In terms of military burden sharing per se, other major alliances and security partnerships do a bit better than NATO, on average. In East Asia, South Korea devotes roughly 2.5 percent of GDP to its military. Taiwan and Australia are close to 2 percent. Japan is at 1.0 percent of GDP—but Washington has favored this level for decades itself, out of worry that higher spending could cause counterreactions among East Asian states fearing (rightly or wrongly) a return to Japanese militarism. In the Middle East, most of America’s security partners spend well over 5 percent of GDP on their militaries—for example, 6 percent for Israel, and more than 12 percent each for Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The United States does not squander huge sums of money basing troops on the territories of its wealthy allies. The United States may spend $10 billion a year at most basing forces in key industrial or Western states—Japan, Korea and Australia in the Pacific region; Germany, Italy, and the UK in particular in Europe. That is only 2 percent of the defense budget. And of that $10 billion, half or more is paid by the host nations themselves. (The situation is different in places like Afghanistan, where specific crises or conflicts have led to more recent deployments of U.S. firepower, and where foreign basing is in fact quite expensive.)

Foreign basing of American forces can often save the United States money.

Foreign basing of American forces can often save the United States money. For example, homeporting an aircraft carrier battle group in Japan obviates the need to have perhaps three more carrier battle groups in the U.S. Navy’s overall fleet (at an investment cost approaching $50 billion) to sustain the same level of presence in the broader western Pacific region. U.S. airfields in Germany facilitate deployments to the Middle East and Afghanistan; the alternative to such bases could well be a need for huge additional numbers of refueling aircraft.

Returning to the original argument: Trump is indeed right that the United States spends a great deal of its large defense budget to defend allies abroad. It is tough to attribute specific amounts to each region, because America’s military forces are flexible. Most are based in the United States in peacetime; most can swing east or west in times of need. But in broad terms, it is not unreasonable to divide up America’s $600 billion defense budget today into roughly four major categories: central defense needs (such as research and development, homeland security, global intelligence assets and operations), forces for Europe, forces for the Asia-Pacific and forces for the broader Middle East. This logic should not be taken too literally, but one could apportion roughly $100 billion to $200 billion for each of these four main purposes of U.S. military power.

In theory, Trump could propose eliminating the forces and defense expenditures that America devotes to any of these key strategic regions where local allies do not wind up doing their fair share, as he has insisted they must. With such a bold stroke, for example, one could imagine pulling the United States out of NATO and reducing the $600 billion annual defense budget to something less than $500 billion. However, Trump says that America’s military should be built up regardless of what happens with these various key alliances, arguing that spending on the nation’s armed forces is one of the most appealing possible investments the country could make. I tend to agree with that latter point—but it contradicts the earlier proposal to scale back U.S. defense spending for any region that shirks its own duties.

The verdict is simple: Trump raises a couple of valid specific critiques about alliance burden sharing in the world today. But he gets several specific points wrong, and misses the big picture: on balance, America’s alliances help this country to undergird a global security system that has dramatically reduced the prevalence of interstate war in modern times, while currently costing the country only 3 percent of its gross domestic product. To paraphrase Trump himself, this is a very good investment—and one that the U.S. global system of alliances and bases does much to make possible.