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A few weeks ago, I was dubious about 2012 as an “anti-incumbent” election.  Alan Abramowitz brings some better data to bear: The graph shows that when congressional incumbents lose, they tend to be mostly from one party.  There are really no elections in which large numbers of incumbents from both parties are defeated.

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 […]

This post is coauthored with my Vanderbilt colleague Marc Hetherington: The politics of 2011 have been dominated by the fruitless search for a “grand bargain” to rein in the federal budget deficit, primarily by curtailing government spending. Much of the surface appeal of budget-cutting stems from a belief that citizens have become so disenchanted with their government that they […]

Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008–2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author…measure(s) changes in Israel’s and Hamas’s military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of […]

President Obama yesterday unveiled this year’s version of a holiday tradition rather closer to presidents’ hearts than the lighting of the White House Christmas tree or the Easter egg roll on the South Lawn. Yes, it’s this year’s quietly released signing statement… This tradition took root when Pres. George W. Bush famously signed into law […]

Courtesy of a political scientist friend.

In my NYT column on how to think about conflicting polls, I wrote: A vast majority of Americans — including half of all self-identified Republicans — think there is “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations.” And a solid majority believes that “the country’s economic system unfairly favors […]

Just as US combat troops are completing their exit from Iraq, prime minister Nuri al-Maliki orders the arrest of the Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi for allegedly ordering assassinations and terrorist attacks.  This escalates a broader tendency of Maliki to go after Sunni politicians, and a decision by Iraqiya, Hashimi’s party, to boycott the parliament and […]

This is a guest post from Lawrence Jacobs, who is the Mondale Chair at the University of Minnesota and the author with Robert Shapiro of Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, among other books. One of the odd paradoxes of American politics is that political polling is soaring as responsiveness […]

At Indolaysia, via Chris Blattman. I am teaching the Government department’s Comparative Methods course in the upcoming semester, and that has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the newest trends (or, maybe, fads) in empirical political science. One stands out: experimental or quasi-experimental research designs that promise that we can have clean identification of […]