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The Factors Behind a Country's Choice of a Multi-Party or Two-Party System

This is a term paper I wrote for my Political Science night class in Comparative Governments (which was a big reason I haven’t been blogging). My wife thought this was extreme overkill for an undergraduate course at a community college (and yes, I got an A), but I was really interested in the topic, and this was the first academic paper I’ve written in a long, long time. Although note, I’ve since made some minor changes from the original paper to make it a bit more accessible and thus less academic.

There are a multitude of factors that affect whether a country becomes a multi-party democracy or a two-party democracy. They include the level of institutionalization of a country’s existing political parties, whether the government is a presidential system or a parliamentary system, the level of diversity in the country’s electorate, and the type of electoral system chosen. Comparing the importance of these factors is beyond the scope of this paper, although it appears that the last one is the most significant factor. It is, however, worth noting that the choice of electoral system itself is affected by several factors, including some of the ones already listed above.

Maxim Gets It All Wrong

Okay, I’m watching the Maxim Hot 100 on VH1, just for… uh… research purposes! Yeah, just in case some important… um… researchy situation where I might need to know who was on it for some science-like reason. Yeah! Oh, and not to mention that I had to make sure that they got it right! Yeah, for that reason.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting but not surprising that Battlestar Galactica’s Grace Park (Boomer) was ranked higher than Tricia Helfer (Number Six), and I have nothing against that random chick who happened to be at #1 — but they were just wrong! I mean, hello? Duh!! It’s supposed to be Natalie Portman!! Is there anybody who doesn’t realize that she’s the hottest thing since sliced bread… oh wait, sliced bread isn’t hot, I mean… uh… toasted bread! Yeah, bread that you left in the toaster oven a little too long and it’s so hot that it… uh… catches on fire and then you try to pull it out of the oven but then the toast is so hot that it burns your fingers and you say to yourself, “Don’t Panic!” and so you think for a bit and then run to the fridge to put butter on them and then you remember that butter actually isn’t good for burns and then you lick it off and it stings like hell but then you go, “mmmmmm, butter!” but then you realize from the taste that it isn’t really butter but margarine instead and then you don’t remember whether that’s okay to put on burns or not and then the smoke alarm goes off and you remember from school that you have to go outside cuz it means it’s a fire drill but you’re too embarrassed because you didn’t listen to Todd Parr and are wearing your clean underwear on your head… um… I mean this is all hypothetical, for illustrative purposes of the hot toast and everything.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Natalie Portman being screwed… uh, I mean shafted… uh… I mean Maxim just got it all completely and totally incorrect by not having her #1. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, there were guys lining up to see her new movie weeks in advance, at the wrong freakin’ theatre! I mean, the damn film was so disappointing because she was only in fourteen scenes and really only had that one semi-interesting outfit where she was brushing her hair, but people still keep going to see the thing. You just can’t get any hotter than that!

But nooooooo, they don’t put the hotness that is Natalie Portman anywhere in the top ten, or the top twenty!!! Or, get this. Not. Even. In. The. Top. Frickin’. FORTY!!!!

Give me a fucking break!

So where did they put her? I kid you not, way down at forty-two! They listed forty-one not-so-hot women… well okay, that Lindsay Lohan isn’t half-bad… but still, when there isn’t a single hottie that is hotter than Natalie, how can you come up with forty-one so-called hotties to be ranked ahead of the one and only precioussss Natalie Portman!!

Un-frickin-believable!

Well, unless…

Unless, of course, this is Maxim’s way of letting everybody know that Natalie Portman is truly the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Yeah, that must be it.

Okay, so never mind! Go back to surfing the net for porn or whatever it was you were doing.

Happy Birthday!

Apologies to those of you patiently waiting for more political commentary. I still have loads to say, I’m just still feeling a bit burned out from the Poli Sci class (and yes, I got an A, so I guess the prof did like my term paper), and work is still rather hectic. But for now, YANPP (yet another Natalie Portman post — and yes, I’ve opened a new category for these).

Of course, this is a very special day! And since I posted this back when I was a Winona stalker fan, I think it’s only appropriate after my upgrade that I now post one for my new obsession object of admiration and drool:

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear the hotness that is Natalie Portman!
Happy Birthday to you!

Happy Birthday, Natalie! I’m sorry that I was remiss in failing to bring up this topic at yesterday’s blogger meetup, but I hadn’t yet entered your birthday into Outlook and Palm. That’s been rectified now. And we did at least discuss you, as you can tell from the recaps.

Anyway, happy 24th! Feel free to drop by if you have trouble finding somebody to give you your 24 spankings!

(Okay, now to go record this in GarageBand so that she’ll be impressed and date me instead of this ridiculously obsessed loser.)

Update 6/13/05

Oh, and happy birthday to my wife, aka my reason for being and the source of all that is good and beautiful in the universe and who is even hotter than the hotness that is Natalie Port… er… I mean Natalie who?

Switching to WordPress

You might have noticed that the site was down last Friday. Looks like a flood of trackback ping spam caused Movable Type to bring down the server. This is the second time that my blog has brought down the server, and my cousin (who runs it) can’t afford this to happen again. I’d already been thinking about moving to WordPress, as I know Courtney, Jon, and Jonas have all recently switched and are pretty happy with it (the alternative would be to upgrade to MT 3.0, but most of the commenting systems look screwed up on the 3.0 blogs that I’ve seen). And since my Poli Sci class is over, I guess now would be a good time.

So bear with me in the next week or two as I figure out how to transition everything over. The site URL will stay the same, so there’ll be no need to update your bookmarks or anything. However, do note that trackback pings here will be disabled until everything’s done, to avoid any further server mishaps. Since I’ve already throttled comments, I’ll leave them enabled for now (most of my spam lately has been trackback spam anyway).

Hopefully, this will all be seamless to you, but I just figured I’d letcha know.

Congressional Over-Raich

By now, you’ve heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in the medical marijuana case, Gonzales v. Raich (previously Ashcroft v. Raich). They ruled that Congress had the power to ban the use of medical marijuana even in states that had voted to allow it. Now, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t play one on TV, and regularly reading The Volokh Conspiracy doesn’t imbue me with magical lawyer-like powers. So I’ll point you to this summary of the opinions from Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy and this very extensive but readily understandable analysis by Larry Solum of the Legal Theory Blog. But since those are long and most of you won’t bother clicking on them anyway, let me try and explain how I see it in my own uniquely flingalicious way.

Vacation (All I Ever Wanted)

I’m on vacation in Montreal! Totally flingalicious blogging to resume next weekend sometime.