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There may be all kinds of things wrong with law schools but they sure have figured out how to run an applications process. You submit one letter for a student, answer a few questions about how to rank students compared to others, and that’s it! By contrast, each policy school and PhD program has its […]

Here is another “not my field” question about the really interesting debate going on on this blog and others, concerning presidential election forecasting models and the question of how much campaigns matter versus the state of economy.  Basically, I’ve never understood what all you adepts mean when you argue about whether “campaigns matter.” We can […]

Political scientist Andrew Reynolds, in the New York Times: Egypt, the largest and most important country to overthrow its government during the Arab Spring, is careening toward a disastrous parliamentary election that begins on Nov. 28 and could bring the country to the brink of civil war. Why?  Part of the problem is the wrong […]

“What we’re doing is, by hand, going through the political science journals and reaching out to people and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think we should include?’ And then try to boil it down to some core studies on topics of interest,” Wihbey said. “Maybe it’s the case that some of the more sophisticated reporters […]

This post is jointly written with Anton Strezhnev, a very bright Georgetown undergraduate. One of the challenges in forecasting elections is that economic data are often inaccurate when first released. Some of the adjustments are substantial.  Just to illustrate this point, the image below (source) shows the change from original issue to current estimate in […]

Lane Kenworthy writes: The book is full of graphs that support the above claims. One thing I like about Kenworthy’s approach is that he performs a separate analysis to examine each of his hypotheses. A lot of social scientists seem to think that the ideal analysis will conclude with a big regression where each coefficient […]

With Rick Perry now in 4th place in GOP polls, I wanted to share this reminder of his glory days in Texas gubernatorial politics before it was too late. The attached radio ad comes from his 2006 reelection campaign against former congressman Chris Bell. Perry won 39%-30% (with two strong independent candidates, bizarrely including Kinky […]

We are delighted to welcome the following guest post from Nathan Jensen (Washington University) and Edmund Malesky (UCSD). The post looks, among others, at whether governor Perry was more likely to award grants to businesses that offered campaign contributions. ***** We have been working on a series of projects on the political benefits of using […]

This is a guest post by political scientist David Peterson of Iowa State University. The allegations about Herman Cain became public on October 31.  Two colleagues and I were fortunate to have a poll of registered Republican and independent voters in Iowa go into the field the very next day, on November 1.  We interviewed […]

Since Josh is temporarily unavailable, I am posting this election round-up by Raj Chari, who is a Senior Lecturer (the Irish equivalent of associate professor) in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, in his stead. The centre-right Partido Popular (PP), under the leadership of Mariano Rajoy, won an absolute majority in Spain’s general election on […]