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P. took the subway to Bowling Green. On his way to the exit, he passed a line of police officers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Outside, police had surrounded the “Charging Bull” with barricades and, a few blocks north, sealed off a stretch of Wall Street around the Stock Exchange. P. tried to look nonchalant as […]

Ben HIghton writes: Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). […]

I have an op-ed on Al Jazeera English in which I propose two different ways of thinking about recent events in Russia, both of which are based on theoretical arguments I have put forward in academic journals (see here and here) in recent years. One focuses on the ability of fraudulent elections to serve as […]

Academics think the press needs to cover interest groups, Congress, and compromise more, even when there’s a presidential election going on. 

Via Cosma in comments at the other place I hang out, this is a very nice teaching tool for the sole and single purpose of getting this point across to students. NB that you need to be logged into a Google ID to use it. My favorite so far is the .8222 correlation between my […]

A few months ago, we reported that Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust. Here’s the quick summary, which (I think) both Bartels and Campbell would agree with: – On average, the economy did a lot better under Democratic than Republican presidents in the first two years of the term. […]

Lavine and his colleagues designed an online survey and got responses from a sample of about 800 citizens, including many who expressed sympathy for the Tea Party and many who did not. The survey asked about programs designed to help people who can’t keep up with their mortgage payments stay in their homes… But the […]

I think the press is way too focused on media strategies — both as they say in the business paid media and earned media — and way too little on grassroots organizing and the so-called “ground game” of politics. Interest groups get under-covered tremendously. There’s also kind of moralism in political journalism; that there are […]

See here. (Run it through Google translate if, like me, you don’t know any Russian.) I don’t know anything here, will defer to the experts on this one.

The entrails of the Arab Spring suggest that Assad will be the fifth dictator to fall only if the Syrian military irrevocably splits or if international military force intervenes on the side of the opposition. Neither looks likely. The Syrian army is dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority and foreign powers have demonstrated no stomach to […]