Blog: The Monkey Cage

Everybody thought that cellular automaton stuff was just B.S., but it looks like Wolfram is now making real progress. The most recent development is in the use of cellular automata for blog spam. (Details here.) P.S. As a special benefit to those of you who read this far, here’s a discussion of statistical models for […]

Featuring Jon Krosnick.

When I was about to leave for college, my father was excitedly looking through my course catalogue for the coming year when he came across a class entitled “Ethics and International Affairs”. Without missing a beat, he looked up at me and said “well, I imagine that will be a pretty short class….” It is […]

From political scientist Arthur Lupia.

Tolga Sinmazdemir, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Washington University in St. Louis in the Department of Political Science, sends along the following response to Alberto Simpser’s now very well read Monkey Cage guest post on the 2012 Mexican elections. In the post, Simpser attempted to estimated the cost of purchasing enough votes to swing the […]

Thomas Ferguson wonders what is the missing-data mechanism operating at the Federal Election Commission.

Over the last decade, international security scholars have created a cottage industry investigating the role of “audience costs” in coercion, thanks in large part to a theoretical argument first put forward by Monkey Cage blogger, James Fearon. The basic argument is that democratic leaders will be more likely to have their threats believed than non-democratic […]

From Gallup.  A similar pattern characterizes feelings toward John Roberts.