trishgmevans

The Financial Times suggests that brinkmanship in the eurozone may lead to catastrophe. Eurozone officials are deliberately refusing to allow Greece to sign off on a €200bn bond restructuring plan because the threat of default is the leverage they have to convince recalcitrant Greek ministers to implement necessary cuts. While some recognise that Greek politicians […]

Fred Bergsten and Jacob Kierkegaard argue that there is nothing to worry about in the eurozone crisis. The economic and financial problems in the Eurozone are clearly serious and plentiful. The area is in the midst of multiple, frequently overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises. … We have complete confidence that, in the crunch, both Germany […]

At Indolaysia, via Chris Blattman. I am teaching the Government department’s Comparative Methods course in the upcoming semester, and that has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the newest trends (or, maybe, fads) in empirical political science. One stands out: experimental or quasi-experimental research designs that promise that we can have clean identification of […]

In 2007, a White House political affairs official made a presentation to political appointees in the General Services Administration, asking them to prioritize spending in 55 congressional districts that the Republican Party was either targeting or trying to defend. As this new article (paywalled – can’t find a non-paywalled version) by Sanford Gordon in the […]

Tom Bartlett describes the efforts of two psychologists to publish replication results for an article, which had purported to show that people could use ESP to predict whether they would be shown erotic pictures in the future. The replication found no observable effect, but (according to the authors’ account of it)had a difficult time finding […]

Over the next several days, Vanessa Williamson will be guestblogging. She and Theda Skocpol have co-authored “The Tea Party and The Remaking of American Conservatism” (Powells, Amazon). We covered some of their research (with John Coggin) on the Monkey Cage here– we are very happy to have her with us.

3 Quarks Daily are holding a competition for best blogpost in politics and the social sciences, with Stephen Walt judging, and a $1,000 prize for the winner. Details below. Feel free to nominate one of our posts if you feel so moved; but feel equally or more free to nominate posts by less-well known blogs […]

Since Josh is temporarily unavailable, I am posting this election round-up by Raj Chari, who is a Senior Lecturer (the Irish equivalent of associate professor) in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, in his stead. The centre-right Partido Popular (PP), under the leadership of Mariano Rajoy, won an absolute majority in Spain’s general election on […]