Blog: The Monkey Cage

This is a guest post from Tanisha Fazal, a political science professor at Columbia University, and Jessica Martini, a human rights and international trade attorney based in New York City. ———- To conduct research on terrorism and insurgency, it’s best to be able to talk to people.  Combing through incident reports is helpful, but often […]

As President Obama prepares to make campaign stops in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida this week, the logic driving his choice of destinations is clear.  With 18, 13, and 29 Electoral College votes, respectively, the outcome of the elections in these three battleground states this fall could easily be the key to determining who will sit […]

The other day, in discussing the virtues of the electoral college compared to national popular vote election for president, Jonathan Bernstein wrote that “the big, urban states traditionally did very well in the electoral college. . . . all else equal, a presidential candidate would rather pander to a large state with lots of winner-take-all […]

Kevin O’Rourke has a new paper which talks inter alia about how public opinion constrains the options of EU decision makers in the current crisis. The first point to note is that the Euro project started with less public support than the Single Market project enjoyed in 1992. Even worse, it started out with negative […]

Via Matthew Yglesias on Twitter, this insight from the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative economics blog looks to plausibly have relevance for political scientists. Milton Friedman’s thermostat is an idea that has very broad application, and has nothing in particular to do with Monetarism or even macroeconomics. Or even economics. … Everybody knows that if you press […]

Jon Healey of the LA Times asked: I was wondering if you’d done any research into whether vice presidential choices make a measurable difference in a presidential candidate’s ability to win. Have you? And if so, what did you find? My reply: A few years ago we did an analysis that estimates the VP effect […]

K. Amber Curtis, Joe Jupille and David Leblang have a paper on Iceland’s “Icesave” referendums, “the only occasions in history on which ‘the people’ were asked to vote directly on sovereign debt resettlement terms.” On the basis of a survey conducted immediately after the second referendum, they find that voting was in part driven by […]

This particular story is pretty frustrating. From economist Stan Liebowitz: There is virtually no interest in detecting cheating. And what good would that do if there is no form of punishment? I say this because I think I have found a case in one of our top journals but the editor allowed the authors of […]

When President Obama headlined his 194th fundraiser for the Obama Victory Fund on Friday, he had already held more fundraisers for his reelection campaign committee and the Democratic National Committee in his third and fourth years in office than his past four predecessors in the Oval Office combined. But while much media attention has focused […]

From PPP: Shades of Godfather’s Pizza.