Blog: The Monkey Cage

In introducing our man-on-the-street reporting from the 2012 London Olympics, I noted the conspicuos lack of writing on The Monkey Cage regarding the Olympics. Fortunately, this post caught the eye of political scientist Dr. Will Jennings, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Southampton and a Research Associate at the Centre for Analysis of […]

Jeff points me to this: Actually, my problem is not so much the Fox graphics team’s continuing ridiculous choices of lower bounds (particularly inappropriate when the data are presented as a set of bars rather than as a line) but rather that the starting point is so recent. Why not provide a bit of perspective […]

In today’s New York Times Susan Saulny’s article “Young in G.O.P. Erase the Lines on Social Issues” appears. Change in party positioning on issues is a very important topic. I wouldn’t have written a book about it if I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, this is a misleading article that demonstrates that the term “social issues”, […]

The following is a guest post from Princeton political scientist Grigore Pop-Eleches on recent political developments in Romania that culminated in a referendum to confirm the impeachment of the president. The material is particularly timely, as the Romanian Constitutional Court is currently hearing challenges to the results of this referendum on the basis of electoral […]

Bryon York reports: Romney aides believe strongly that this race will play out like the 1980 campaign, in which President Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan for much of the race until Reagan broke through just before the election. As Jonathan Chait noted, 1980 is a poor comparison with 2012 for many reasons.  One is simply […]

Recent weeks have seen a series of attacks on the Obama administration’s use of waivers to exempt states from the provisions of federal law. Most prominent until now had been Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s issuance of waivers to the No Child Left Behind Law. Yesterday, though, Mitt Romney accused the Obama administration of seeking to remove […]

Jason Dempsey writes: Someone casually reading the news would have the right to be confused over seemingly contradictory stories on the political preferences of military service members and veterans. According to Gallup, “Veterans Give Romney Big Lead Over Obama,” while Reuters claims that “Weary Warriors Favor Obama.” Both are true. . . . The bulk […]

From a new survey of social psychologists: Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a “conservative perspective” would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in […]

Once again, we bring you Alastiar Ruffles on the 2012 London Olympics: ************** Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (or ‘Bo Jo’, or plain ‘Boris’ for short) is perhaps the most recognisable figure in current British politics, partly thanks to his trademark disheveled hairstyle but also due to his remarkable ‘off the cuff’ style when dealing […]

Back in January, Lynn Vavreck, Joshua Tucker, and I asked this question: what would happen if people knew more specific details about Mitt Romney’s income and tax rate?  We conducted a simple experiment the exposed people to information about these topics.  In this post, I will report on a new iteration of this experiment, which […]