Blog: The Monkey Cage

 The Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project, directed by Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer, will provide timely data on Americans’ reactions to presidential campaign ads throughout the current campaign season. The project will monitor public assessments of the fairness, credibility, and tone of selected ads using weekly samples of registered voters provided by the internet survey firm YouGov. According to Geer, “We thought […]

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Martin Gilens appears on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Hide your children!  More here.

I get about 10 requests to referee journal articles each week. At this point, even the saying No part is getting tiring. I think I’d much prefer Kriegeskorte’s system of post-publication review where whatever you write about a paper is open and available to all to read, and where you can devote your review efforts […]

Much of the United States is in the midst of the worst drought in fifty years, and according to the National Weather Service, “it is likely to grow worse.” An Illinois crop biologist says, “It’s like farming in hell.” Environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert notes that “the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, […]

The following is a guest post from Mona Yacoubian, a Senior Advisor on the Middle East at the Stimson Center. *********** With heavy fighting in Syria’s two largest cities and international diplomacy faltering, Syria is poised to descend into a protracted civil war.  The regime’s collapse, whether sudden or protracted, will not herald a peaceful […]

Anthony Fowler and Andrew Hall send along a new paper, “Conservative Vote Probabilities: An Easier Method for the Analysis of Roll Call Data”: We propose a new roll-call scaling method based on OLS which is easier to imple- ment and understand than previous methods and also produces directly interpretable estimates. This measure, Conservative Vote Probability […]

Over the past 50 years, our nation has become one far less enamored of keeping up our culture of guns.

When it comes to making policy, Mormons take a backseat to no one on conservative ideological purity. We examined the voting records of every Mormon United States senator serving from 1976 through the early years of the 21st century. (The behavior of senators can give us a good approximation of the decisions that a future […]

That’s Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, by my friend and former colleague Martin Gilens, published this week by Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation. The current issue of Boston Review features a terrific symposium on the book, with Gilens’s nice summary of the argument and reactions from  Russ Feingold, John Ferejohn, […]

This is a guest post by my colleague Brandon Bartels. ***** As the issue of forecasting has been on the minds of political scientists and journalists as of late (examples 1 2 3 4), I thought I would weigh in on this issue as it pertains to predictions of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the […]