John Sides

A Monkey Cage reader and long-time affiliate of Washington public interest groups asks: Do public interest groups influence policy decisions?  For an answer, I asked two political scientists who study interest groups: Dara Strolovich, the author of Affirmative Advocacy, and Matt Grossmann, the author of the forthcoming Not So Special Interests.  Here is their post: Categorizing groups as representing […]

You don’t need to psychoanalyze the American people to figure out that they tend to prefer the party they belong to.

The sentence that spawned super-PACs. Super-PACs and the shadow party system. But see Jon Bernstein. Too many men destabilize the world.  [Hat tip to Daniel Lippman] Blame testosterone. [Hat tip to Dot Smith]

I am fascinated by this result from the latest HuffPo-Patch poll of Republican party elites in the early primary and caucus states: Nearly three-fourths, 74%, of these party insiders believe that “can beat Obama” describes Cain “very well” or “somewhat well.” That’s more confidence than I would expect. I would be interested to know why […]

Welcome!

My new post at 538 looks at whether motherhood affects political attitudes, including attitudes toward marijuana. It speaks to the trend toward acceptance of marijuana and what, if anything, might slow that trend. It seems logical, as Megan McArdle has suggested, that becoming a parent might make you less supportive of legalized marijuana. I draw […]

Elections in developing countries commonly fail to deliver accountability because of manipulation, often involving collusion between corrupt election offcials and political candidates. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of Quick Count Photo Capture—a monitoring technology designed to detect the illegal sale of votes by corrupt election offcials to candidates—carried out in 471 polling […]

From The Atlantic’s comments section.  Courtesy of Chris Albon.