PapaBigears

From Brendan Nyhan: Pre-accept articles. Choose a random sample of articles and “audit” them by replicating them. Give “frequent flyer” points to scholars who are particularly diligent in helping journals, e.g., via peer review. I think these ideas are interesting.  At this point, given the many dysfunctions in scholarly publishing, let’s be honest: it’s time […]

Amidst all of today’s silly discussion of the presidential horserace—silly because of the limited predictive power of trial heat polls at this point—I haven’t really seen anyone draw attention to this: I mean the party breakdown.  Remember when Obama was going to lose the support of all those Democrats dissatisfied with his weak-kneed compromises?  And […]

Show up at one of these—and, as best as I can tell, I am the only journalist in America who does routinely—and one may actually come away wiser. You might have second thoughts about some of the media’s ironclad assumptions as we dissect politics, especially in an election year, not to mention learning a lot […]

It is hardly surprising that voters’ moods and their assessments of the incumbent president are strongly colored by current economic conditions. From the standpoint of good government, however, their myopic focus on current conditions seems quite counter-productive. On one hand, myopic economic voting provides little electoral incentive for presidents to generate income growth through most […]

Instead of the internet promoting fundamental political change, it seems to reinforce political change in countries that already have at least some level of democratic freedoms. Internet use is a less effective means to mobilize citizens for democracy in extremely authoritarian countries. That’s Erik Nisbet, commenting on a new study with Elizabeth Stoycheff and Katy […]

In general, be wary of any claim that there is a single path to victory, particularly if that path involves a candidate’s personality. That’s the conclusion of my new post at 538.  It is both a reaction to recent polling and commentary on Romney’s “empathy gap,” and a brief tour of some political science research […]

Any elected official who thinks the public is squarely on board with higher rates against upper-income earners should consider these results, then, and think twice. From a Wall Street Journal op-ed by political scientists Brian Gaines and Doug Rivers.  Here is the crux of their findings.  On the one hand: Sixty-one percent of respondents favored […]

Evangelicalism is the most potent worldview force in conservatizing Latino political attitudes, with secularity and Catholicism influential to a lesser degree as well. From a newly published piece (gated; ungated) by Troy Gibson and Christopher Hare.  Here’s a table from the article, showing the predicted probability of being a Democrat, independent, or Republican for Latinos […]

Term limits for Supreme Court justices are in the news again.  See, for example, Timothy Noah and links therein.  We had a go-round on this here in 2010.  See my two posts, and links therein to Andy and Matt Yglesias.  The piece of research to read is Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz’s article, “Where Have […]

Imagine, for a moment, that you didn’t need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don’t stand for anything? Or would it enable the […]