PapaBigears

Eitan Hersh: It turns out that caucus attendees are different from primary voters, but not because they have a stronger commitment to politics. Rather, caucus-goers are outliers because they tend to be more engaged in community endeavors, like in volunteering and school committee work, compared to primary voters. Why? His explanation: The reason for this […]

People who say they distrust the media in general are more likely to consume news from partisan outlets, outlets that already agree with them, and this will reinforce their positions, whether those positions are right or wrong. I also find a good deal of evidence that when people who distrust the media confront information attributed […]

Courtesy of a political scientist friend.

Jordan Ragusa spells it out, including the shocking revelation that the Constitution doesn’t mention them!

As has been thoroughly documented on The Monkey Cage, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is no fan of the National Science Foundation’s funding of political science research.  Consider, for example, this: “Political science would be better left to pundits and voters,” said Don Tatro, Senator Coburn’s press secretary, in an interview. “Federal research dollars should go […]

In response to Michael Lewis-Beck’s guest post below, the New York Times Washington Bureau Chief David Leonhardt tweets: Conclusion seems either off or old. IA’s UE rate is still 6% & risen much less than US vs 12/07. There are two questions that I think pertain to the original NYT article Lewis-Beck was responding to.  […]

The short answer: not very well.  That’s the subject of my first post over at the Washington Post’s polling blog, Behind the Numbers.  It features this graph from Lynn Vavreck and Michael LaCour.  Below is the graph.  See the post for more.

My new post at 538 looks at some new research on the political attitudes of the very wealthy.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are different than the proverbial 99%!

Here’s Gallup’s post.  The lede: Republicans’ enthusiasm about voting in the election for president next year has decreased, with 49% of Republicans and independents who lean Republican now saying they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, down from 58% in September. This narrows the gap between them and Democrats, 44% of whom are more […]

This is a guest post by Andrew Reynolds.  He is the Chair of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been an adviser on election design in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Jordan. He is the coauthor with Jason Brownlee and Tarek Masoud of the forthcoming book, The Arab Spring: […]