PapaBigears

It has become conventional wisdom that international relations theory and policy have little in common. So someone like Stephen Walt tries to argue that realism, a major IR theory, would have led to different policy choices since the end of the Cold War and he gets criticized for not realizing that policymakers don’t care about […]

Apropos of Romney’s “even Jimmy Carter” remark, from a January 2011 CNN poll: From what you have heard, read or  remember about some of our past presidents, please tell me if you  approve or disapprove of the way each of the following handled their  job as president: Jimmy Carter?” Carter’s approval rating wasn’t all that […]

This is a guest post from Aleks Ksiazkiewicz, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rice. ***** One of the most difficult things about being a junior scholar (and perhaps a senior scholar too) is finding funds for small research projects and pilot studies. Crowd-funding, which relies on receiving small donations from many individuals, presents […]

Guy Lodge and Sarah Birch: Increasing electoral turnout is not just a nice idea, it is something we must actively strive for if elections are to serve the needs of all citizens….So how can we increase rates of electoral participation, particularly among ‘hard-to-reach’ groups such as the young and the poor? …by far the most […]

This is a guest post by Claire Adida of UCSD, David Laitin of Stanford, and Marie-Anne Valfort of the Paris School of Economics & Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University.  We have previously discussed their research here and here. ***** Muslims express more traditional views toward gender-based inequality than do non-Muslims. Relying on the World Values […]

This is a guest post from Michael LaCour, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at UCLA.  The paper on which this post is based is here. ***** The reemergence of a prominent partisan press has led many scholars to investigate partisan self-selection of news outlets. Political scientists and journalists have concluded that individuals are motivated […]

A la the Murray Hill campaign in 2010, another business is running for office: Farmscape.  Their site is here.  “Bio” is above.  Here is video from when they registered the company to vote.

This is a final guest-post from Jonathan Ladd.  We appreciate his contributions.  His other posts are here and here. ***** In my final post on media distrust, I would like to explore the connection between attitudes toward the media and partisan self-selection of news outlets.  In the past 20 years, the number of news sources […]

This is a second guest post from Jonathan Ladd.  His first post is here. ***** Yesterday, I discussed causes if media distrust. Now, I would like to focus on the consequences.  A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead […]

Jay Cost responds to the Washington Post’s forecasting model that I helped put together: I find Klein’s model to be particularly unpersuasive, but all these models seem to share a similar problem: they take the blowout elections of 1952, 1956, 1964, 1972, 1980, and 1984 not as historical peculiarities with little relevance to today, but […]