Taeku Lee's blog

What do the ongoing social revolution in Cairo, Egypt and the 1957 movie, An Affair to Remember, have in common? 

The answer: Thomas Schelling. 

It has been nearly impossible not to watch transfixed to a television or listen raptly by a radio to the unfolding news about the demands of Egyptians from all walks of life for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.  One aspect of this remarkable bottom-up demand for accountability has thus far received little attention: Why Tahrir Square?

On Saturday, June 26th, nearly 4,000 Americans from all walks of life participated in an all-day country-wide deliberation on the nation's fiscal future.  Town hall meetings held in 19 sites occupied the main stage for the day, with smaller scale discussions in more than 40 additional communities across the country and online venues for participatory input as well.  The event, organized by AmericaSpeaks had all the markers of political deliberation, American-style: electronic keypads and networked computers that lent a technologically updated verisimilitude to George Gallup's idea of palpating the "pulse of democracy" and, of course, lots of political contestation (more on this below).

Imagine you have walked back home from your local town market on a jasmine-scented Saturday morning with a bagful of the season’s harvest. In Northern California in the summer, that bag will probably contain some heirloom tomatoes, hothouse cucumbers, red bell peppers, Meyer lemons, and mint sprigs. As you sit to rest your feet, your mouth starts to water in anticipation of how these provisions will taste. They are meant to entertain guests over supper later in the evening, but you simply cannot wait and decide to steal a sampling of small pieces of each item. 

The on-going controversy around the presidential election result in Iran raises an important curiosity.  It is clear at the present moment that the official results have defied expectations and dashed hopes for many.  From the standpoint of political accountability, there are at least two important questions that arise.  First, where do these expectations and hopes come from?  Perceptions that the election was "stolen" must be based in some sense of a range of plausible outcomes, and the declared 63% to 34% split clearly fell out of this range for Moussavi supporters and comfortably within this range for Ahmadinejad supporters.  The problem of conflicting pre-election expectations is an old one, rooted in what social scientists often call "homophily."  Where we stand is often determined by where we sit, and we tend to sit in deeply embedded and entrenched social information networks amongst others who are very much like us in body, mind, and spirit.  Those in the Ahmadinejad camp most likely set their expectations in the company of other Ahmadinejad supporters and those in the Moussavi camp most likely set their expectations in the company of fellows who championed Moussavi's cause.

The 2008 presidential election in the United States has been touted as an epic battle over many things – over whether and how to continue US military involvement in Iraq, over whether and how to boost private companies’ efforts to dig their way out of a global financial markets crisis, over whether and how to change the overarching course of the country from the trajectory it has been on for the past eight years.  These contours of the fight are demonstrably in evidence.  Perhaps the most divisive aspect of 2008, however, has been a soul-searching struggle over who is the “American public” and which candidate best represents that imagined electorate. 

As I sat down to finish writing my second blog entry for “People, Spaces, and Deliberation” -- which was to be a discussion of two contrasting approaches to deliberation in the European Union in 2007 -- Anne-Katrin’s entry on John Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy (1984) caught my eye.  Then Sina’s ensuing entry drew my attention further away from deliberation in the EU and right smack into Kingdon’s processual world of problems, policies, and politics streaming together and apart.  I sympathized

Mohandas Gandhi once declared, in his inimicably insightful and economical manner that “those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.”  The same could be said, in obverse, of politics vis-à-vis religion.  We often bemoan the paucity of concrete policy debates in an election or lampoon incumbent presidents for declaring a “mission accomplished” well ahead of its due.  Yet when we do so we ignore, at our peril, the reality that politics is quite often a faith-based quest, not an evidence-based venture.