Blog: The Monkey Cage

In our continuing series of election reports, we now present a pre-election report for next month’s Ukrainian Parliamentary Election.  The post is authored by political scientist Erik Herron of the University of Kansas, and originally appeared on his post-communist elections blog “ВСЕ НА ВЫБОРЫ“. ***** With just over six weeks remaining until Ukraine’s October 28 […]

While media reports on the Arab uprisings discussed the difficulty of estimating crowd size and pondered what percentage of the population they represented, much of the current media coverage of the recent riots that erupted throughout the Muslim world on September 11, 2012 in response to the anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslim,” has described the events […]

We welcome as a new occasional contributor Eric Patashnik, Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia.  Eric’s research focuses on public policy, especially health care and social welfare.  His books include Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted. With Alan Gerber, he is currently finishing a book […]

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president […]

When it rains, it pours! Here is our third post-election report on the 2012 Dutch parliamentary elections (first two are here and here), this time from political scientist Joop van Holsteyn of Leiden University. ***** On September 12, 2012 it was Election Day again in the Netherlands. Again, since this was the fifth time in […]

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have a 2nd post-election report (or 3rd if you count Erik’s paragraph at the end of his turnout post yesterday) on the Dutch parliamentary election, this time from Martijn Schoonvelde, a PhD candidate in political science at Stony Brook University. ******* Yesterday’s parliamentary election results […]

In a town so accustomed to polarization, today’s consensus at the Fed for a major change in monetary policy was remarkable.  As Ben Bernanke put it, “The basic ideas are broadly espoused inside the committee.”  Although it will be five years before we get to see the transcripts of this week’s deliberations inside the FOMC, we […]

For those of you who didn’t hear it on NPR last night, Nature just published a fascinating study by Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler on an experiment to increase voter turnout via Facebook messages. One third of 61 million Facebook users were randomly assigned to receive a […]

Continuing our series of election reports, we present a post-election report of yesterday’s Dutch parliamentary elections. The report is provided by political scientist Gijs Schumacher of the University of Southern Denmark and VU University Amsterdam. ***** Most pundits agreed that the Dutch parliamentary elections held on September 12th would strengthen the radical left Socialist party […]

I’d like to see Paul Krugman’s evidence for this claim: What really happened in the final months of [the 2000] election? The answer — not a popular one with journalists, but very obviously true to anyone who lived through it — was that the press took sides. Reporters liked Bush and didn’t like Gore, and […]