deannab413

This YouTube video was posted on the Democratic Rapid Response YouTube channel. According to the information on the side of the post, the last activity on the channel was yesterday. As you’ll notice, there is actually plenty of footage from the debate itself. This means the video – which looks pretty good – must have […]

I was lecturing about transitions to democracy today, and I mentioned that my colleague Adam Przeworski has argued that no country with a GDP above $6,000/per capita that becomes a democracy has later lost its status as a democracy. I noted that this was one of the few iron rules of politics that political scientists […]

The following letter is co-authored by my NYU colleague William Easterly and will appear in the January 12, 2012 edition of the NY Review of Books:. To the Editors: On September 14, 2011, Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist and dissident blogger, was arrested by the Ethiopian authorities shortly after publishing an online column calling for […]

The following is a guest post from Caitlin Talmadge, a political scientist at George Washington University: The past week has seen rising tensions between Iran and the United States over the narrow waterway known as the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 90% of the Persian Gulf’s oil is exported each day. Iran’s vice president […]

As part of our continuing relationship with section newsletters of the American Political Science Association, we present the next contribution from the editors of the Political Economy Section newsletter, Scott Gehlbach and Lisa Martin: Motivated by recent events in the Mideast and elsewhere, the current issue of the Political Economist looks at autocracies: how they […]

For those of you looking for a potential break from all Iowa, all the time at some point today, I want to suggest a very thoughtful piece on Putinism by NYU Law Professor Stephen Holmes in the London Review of Books on how we ought best to interpret the current status of Putinism in Russia. […]

As promised, here is the second part of Professor Andrew Barnes’ overview of how the field of the political-economy of post-communism has evolved over the past 20 years. In the last several years, analysts have begun to explain how post-communist political economies work in practice.  A central theme of many of these writings is the […]

We are pleased to welcome professors Charles Tien of Hunter College and Michael Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa with what we hope will be a regular feature on The Monkey Cage over the next 12 months: their current “nowcast” of the 2012 presidential election. In contrast to the usual election forecasting approaches, we offer […]

With everything going on in Russia, I thought it might be a good time to revisit exactly what we know about the political economy of post-communism. I was fortunate enough to attend a wonderful conference last week at George Washington University co-sponsored by PONARS Eurasia, IERES, and the Woodrow Wilson–Kennan Institute. on “Two Decades of […]

In our continuing series of election reports, we welcome Tim Haughton, a 2011-12 Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and Alenka Krasovec, an Associate Professor at the University of Ljubljana, with the following report on the December 2011 […]