PapaBigears

This is a guest post from political scientist James Gimpel, in response to the exchange between Abrams and Fiorina and Bishop.  The links are mine. ***** First, I like The Big Sort, and I have assigned it in undergraduate classes.   It is well-written, compared to most other options, and provokes a lot of thought and […]

Josh Putnam and I have a new op-ed at Bloomberg View that takes on a few myths about this year’s Republican primary.  In short, we show that: The GOP’s delegate allocation process did not switch wholesale from a winner-take-all rule prior to 2012 to a proportional rule in 2012.  This is a common misconception, despite […]

Brendan Nyhan concludes a great post on the Etch-a-Sketch comment by saying: We’re currently 158 days from the Republican convention, and “Etch a Sketch-gate” will likely prove to be just as inconsequential. By the time the general election rolls around, the incident will most likely be forgotten. I agree and said as much on Twitter.  […]

…we’re extraordinarily happy to announce one of the most significant milestones in the history of Open States: as of today, all 50 states (as well as DC and Puerto Rico) are now supported via our API and bulk downloads. This makes Open States the first and only completely open, completely free resource for accessing legislative […]

Paul Ryan’s budget would cut a lot of government spending.  It would cut entitlement spending.  It would cut aid to the poor, transportation, education, veterans benefits, and scientific research.  There have been plenty of responses to the budget, positive and negative.  But only a couple that I’ve seen—Jon Bernstein’s and Stan Collender’s—anticipate this potential problem: […]

This is a response by Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort, to the critique of Abrams and Fiorina.  I blogged about that critique here.  The links below are mine. ***** Before Bob Cushing and I published our first article in the Austin newspaper on sorting in 2004, we heard Dr. Fiorina wouldn’t like it. […]

More from Gallup is here.

Here is a lengthy NPR story on how racial attitudes affect views of health care reform.  It features the research of Michael Tesler.  The abstract of the paper: This study argues that President Obama’s strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, […]

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? This paper studies the effect of the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through a series of rallies across the country on April 15, Tax Day, 2009. To identify the causal effect of protests, […]

Nicolas Sarkozy, will receive 48.1% of the vote in the second round of the French presidential election in May 2012 against 51.9% for the candidate of the moderate Left, the Socialist François Hollande. That is the forecast of political scientists Martial Foucault and Richard Nadeau, contingent on current trends in unemployment and Sarkozy’s current approval […]