PapaBigears

A new political science blog, Mischiefs of Faction, is up and running.  It is run by political scientists Greg Koger, Seth Masket (also of Enik Rising), and Hans Noel.  We’ve also been pleased to have Koger and Noel as occasional contributors here.  From the inaugural post: This blog is devoted to advancing and debating our […]

Bruni writes several hundred words on the competing biographies of Romney and Obama—arguing that Obama’s is the more compelling—and then says this: In the end, that may not make a whit of difference. If swing voters were driven chiefly by candidates’ biographies, political analysts trying to predict election outcomes wouldn’t dwell so much on external […]

On this Memorial Day—and in light of this Gallup poll result—I thought it might be timely to list some of our posts about how enlisted men and women, officers, and veterans behave politically: Do veterans vote differently than non-veterans? Does military service helps candidates win? How do officers vote? Comparing officers to enlisted men and […]

Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, this article offers a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution […]

A new Public Policy Poll finds a substantial increase in support for gay marriage among African-Americans in Maryland.  How should we interpret this?  Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer think it’s evidence that presidential leadership can move public opinion.  Brendan Nyhan notes that public opinion nationally hasn’t really moved—citing Lynn Vavreck and Ryan Enos’s analysis as […]

For each of four weeks, participants made probabilistic forecasts in four domains relating to domestic and international politics and economics: the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index, the national unemployment rate, Obama’s presidential job approval ratings, and the price of crude oil. I randomly assigned 308 participants to one of three groups. The base rate […]

Congress now speaks at almost a full grade level lower than it did just seven years ago, with the most conservative members of Congress speaking on average at the lowest grade level, according to a new Sunlight Foundation analysis of the Congressional Record using Capitol Words. Of course, what some might interpret as a dumbing […]

So concludes a new paper by Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do: We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state’s centroid to instrument for the concentration of […]

This is a guest post by Lynn Vavreck and Ryan Enos. **** YouGov is in the field each week on Saturday mornings with a nationwide, 1,000-person survey.  Today, we look at the surveys before and after President Obama’s ABC interview during which he came out in support of same-sex marriage. The interview made news for […]

Did Sarah Palin get the pick right? Is Fischer the more conservative choice? The answer is yes. Fischer is in 96th percentile for conservatism in the officially nonpartisan Nebraska unicameral, and in the 93rd percentile of identified Republicans. That is, only 7 percent of Nebraska Republicans are more conservative than she in recent years. If […]