Blog: The Monkey Cage

Commenter Jason writes: Poor whites are very much the republican base and have been for the past 20 – 30 years, I refer you to “what’s the matter with Kansas” and any number of other books about people voting against their economic interests. If poor whites werent the GOP base who is it? College educated […]

Discussion here (see also Basbøll comment). I don’t actually know of any cases of data faking in political science and, Frank Fischer aside, our field doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with plagiarism copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. But I know that some of you […]

Veronika Polakova of the American Enterprise Institute sends along the following analysis: Although the media is now focused on Chief Justice Roberts following his surprising health care vote, long-time Supreme Court watchers know that Justice Kennedy is the Court’s true swing voter. An analysis of the Supreme Court 2010 and 2011 terms sheds new light […]

Adam Berinsky has new data: These polls demonstrate that the public is back where it was before Obama released his long form birth certificate. In April 2011 55% of the public believed that Obama was born in the United States. Today 55% of the public believes that he was born in the United States.

John and I are members (along with Sean Aday, Deen Freelon and Marc Lynch) of a multi-author team which has been doing USIP sponsored work on new technology and the Arab Spring. The USIP has just published a report based on our findings, which suggest that Twitter was rather more important as a way of […]

In view of the large amount of attention yesterday’s post on the potential for vote buying in the 2012 Mexican presidential election has received, we are very pleased to have a second follow up post-election report on this election from  Marco A. Morales, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University, that […]

Ezra Klein asks: …we’ve still got four months until the election. Four months in which we’re going to be covering the campaign also nonstop. So help me out here: What’s going to matter between now and then? “Going to matter” is a high bar.  I’ll frame my answer as “worth watching because some previous research […]

This is a guest post from Scott Wolford of the University of Texas-Austin and Emily Ritter of the University of Alabama, both international relations scholars. —— The Guardian reports the US and the UK are considering offering Syrian president Bashar al Assad safe passage and possibly clemency for his alleged role in war crimes to […]

David Frum points us to a recent op-ed by Brooks on happiness. Frum writes that Brooks presents a lot of statistics in a very reasonable-sounding way (in the Brooksian mode of low-key concerned conservatism) but without quite answering the questions posed in the op-ed. Here’s Brooks: Who is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? […]

Over at Freakonomics, Sudhir Venkatesh is conducting a poll: Imagine that, in order to respond both to budgetary pressures and calls for greater relevance of the American academy, College & University Presidents are re-examining their social science disciplines. They have decided to eliminate one major discipline. In your opinion, which of the following is no […]