Anyway, Italy has weird politics. Their government is based around PR (proportional representation), so they have a fuckload of parties. This is because of what we call "Duverger's law." If you have a "plurality rule" system, everything reduces to two main parties because minor parties don't have a chance of winning. So, all but the dumbest people (see: Stein, Jill) join a major party to have a chance of winning. In PR, the proportion of seats a party gets in the legislature is the proportion of the vote that it gets. Then, forming a "government," meaning selecting a Prime Minister, a cabinet, etc., requires a majority vote within the Parliament (PR systems also tend to be "parliamentary," meaning that the executive is chosen by the legislature). That requires a coalition among squabbling, fractious parties.
In Italy, there has been a long tradition of those coalitions forming, and then breaking down. When those coalitions break down, the government "collapses." And that used to happen very fast.
There is a set of statistical models often used in medicine called "survival" models, or, "duration" models. Basically, how long until an event happens? As in, how long until you die? Does that get extended when you take a new drug? The first use of this type of model in political science was a 1984 article by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla called, "The Political Reliability of Italian Governments," in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 78, No. 2, pages 318-337). Cioffi-Revilla used a fancy statistical model to estimate time to Italian government collapse, and what caused variation. Cool, right?
And how funny is it that Italian governments were unstable enough to allow this?
So... Joe Barton. Dick-pics. Remember Anthony Weiner? Or, Chris Lee? The times, they are a-changin'. Not that I'm a Dylan fan, as I have ranted before. They really are a-changin', though. There will come a point at which we will be able to do survival analysis of the careers of Members of Congress with revealed dick-pics.
I look forward to that time. Either that, or survival analysis until dick-pics are revealed. Or... something like that. Right now, the samples just aren't... big enough. Not that I'm casting aspersions. We'll get there, though.