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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 […]

William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations has just released the U.S. portion of its its fourth survey on Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP). The unedited results are here and Foreign Policy’s write-up with pretty graphs and analysis here. The survey is best known for producing rankings of undergraduate, […]

For those of you looking for a potential break from all Iowa, all the time at some point today, I want to suggest a very thoughtful piece on Putinism by NYU Law Professor Stephen Holmes in the London Review of Books on how we ought best to interpret the current status of Putinism in Russia. […]

I am here in Iowa with Lynn Vavreck. I’ll have more to report on our minor adventures later. But before the caucus takes place, it’s important to address a perennial concern: the unrepresentativeness of people who attend the caucus. This is a familiar refrain that typically involves claims about the high costs the caucus imposes […]

Soon after Pearl Harbor, acting under political pressure and without time to design and pre-test a survey, interviewers from the Agriculture Department’s Program Surveys spoke to people in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and California’s Imperial Valley. These “preliminary impressions” found a range of views toward Japanese-Americans, with more negative opinions in rural areas, among […]

Jacob Felson points me to this discussion by Alexander Astin of a recent book on college education: The implications of the study recently released with the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, have been portrayed . . . in apocalyptic terms: “extremely devastating in what it says […]

From James Choi.

at Esquire magazine I respect any reporters who go out and do the work of actually talking to ordinary people, and I especially respect any political reporters who do so, because too much of our elite political reporting takes place within the self-contained Beltway terrarium of politicians, consultants, think-tankers, and other relatively useless fauna. And […]

Are caucus goers very different from primary voters?  Political scientist Eitan Hersh thinks not. Is the weather in Iowa likely to matter on Tuesday?  Political scientist Brad Gomez thinks not. Should the United States be preparing for a military strike against Iranian nuclear targets?  Political scientist (and Georgetown colleague) Matthew Kroenig thinks so, with replies […]

Chris Schmid is a statistician at New England Medical Center who is an expert on evidence-based medicine. I invited him to present an introductory overview lecture on the topic at last year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, and here are his slides. All 123 of them. I don’t know how he expected to go though all of […]