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Political scientists Regina Smyth and William Bianco have written a pithy and interesting analysis of the sorts of deals that might emerge from the Super-Committee and, perhaps more importantly, the kinds of side-payments that party leaders might have to make if one of those deals is to win enough support in each chamber. Here is […]

You can see my contribution to the discussion here. I discuss the research of Jan Leighley, Jonathan Nagler, and others. Here’s my conclusion: Whether or not mandatory voting is a good idea, I think it’s unlikely to happen at a national level. Even setting aside the practical difficulties of taking a now-voluntary action and making […]

The sky is falling! The Euro is collapsing! What can we do? Look, up in the sky: it’s a bird! it’s a plane, it’s….TECHNOCRATIC GOVERNMENT! Destined to save small and large European governments alike, the sudden appearance of technocratic government as a deus ex machnia is probably raising a similar thoughts in most (especially American) […]

Twenty years ago today, Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive.  In my newest post at 538, I discuss how this affected public opinion, drawing on a 1994 paper by political scientist Philip Pollock.  The upshot: Johnson’s announcement led the public to think about HIV and AIDS in terms of opinions about heterosexual sex, rather […]

It is well-known that non-human animals respond to information encoded in vocal signals, and the same can be said of humans. Specifically, human voice pitch affects how speakers are perceived. As such, does voice pitch affect how we perceive and select our leaders? To answer this question we recorded men and women saying “I urge […]

The hidden quality of social welfare benefits in the tax code means that many people are largely unaware of them, and have no idea of their overall impact. How could these policies of the submerged state be revealed, and what difference would it make? Matt Guardino and I created a web-based experiment to test the […]

Wow, that Steve Forbes guy is pretty dumb! I wonder how someone this foolish got a column in Forbes magazine???

Overall, then, I’d say there’s evidence that a white-knight candidate can succeed in executive office if he comes either from a government-dominated business sector such as telecoms where lobbying and politics are a major part of the business, or if he has been a senior officer in the secret police. White-knight leaders’ terms, if politically […]

Mark Thoma, live at SSRN … economics lost communication with policymakers and practitioners leaving room for all sorts of “charlatans and cranks” to fill the void. In doing so, academics ceded important ground to think tanks aligned with one party or the other, to self-appointed economic experts, to business economists maximizing profit rather than public […]

My call last week for bizarre political ads from across the globe received a fair number of peculiar and sometimes downright frightening examples. Especially popular were singing politicians, like these German Social-Democrats and Iceland’s Best Party, which actually won the mayoral election for which the ad was made although, according to commenter Sona, they failed […]