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Dan Hopkins, Danny Hayes, and I will be contributing regularly to Behind the Numbers, the polling blog of the Washington Post.  The announcement is here.  We hope to be contributing discussion of new scholarly literature as well as our own analyses of polling data from the Post and others.  We thank Jon Cohen and the […]

For your weekend viewing pleasure, from official Monkey Cage cartoonist Ted McCagg:

At least that’s what I think he means by saying that “we need to reboot our whole system.” Details here.

I linked a while back to the the Sunlight Foundation’s PAC Name Generator, which they created to point out the absurd vagueness of many PAC names.  But as it turns out, several actual PACs were created that matched names from the generator.  See here.  Coincidence?

One of the ways to get a handle on the current Egyptian elections is to try to compare them to the first set of post-communist elections. Some similarities are immediately apparent. Turnout is high. The forces of the “Old Regime” are apparently doing badly. But perhaps more illustrative, however are the following differences: First, the […]

James Fowler and Mark Pletcher have a new research project on health and social networks. If more people join and the researchers get data from a broader and denser social network, the results should be more informative. I don’t know any more about the study than what’s on the website, but it looks interesting.

Erik recently blogged about a new paper (pdf) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that used Google searches to measure racial prejudice in American media markets and found this: The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election. The Google methodology […]

Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of […]

One of the driving forces behind the creation of Google Insights was the observation that Google searches can predict flu epidemics more quickly than other types of observations. Shauna Reilly, Sean Richey, and Benjamin Taylor have a forthcoming article (nongated), which suggests that political behavior too can be predicted from search terms. In particular they […]