Blog: The Monkey Cage

Cranky Reader: Sides, you are not only a moron, but a liar. Me: You again?  Last time you were insulting me for predicting that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee.  How’d that work out for you? CR: Don’t change the subject.  You said you weren’t an election forecaster, and now you are involved in […]

Of course, Democrats and Republicans are becoming increasingly polarized in their views of Romney.  From Gallup: This trend will likely continue. Most interesting is the recent partisan polarization in views of the economy.  Again, from Gallup: In September 2011, Democrats and Republicans were 24 points apart on the economic confidence index.  Now they are 53 […]

Following my post last week on the topic of which economic conditions are most important for understanding variation in US presidential election results—and the difficulty inherent in this kind of enterprise when there are only 16 elections in your data set—University of Connecticut political scientist Matthew Singer kindly offered to provide a follow up guest […]

Via Catherynne Valente (novelist – and also the daughter of a political scientist) on teh Twitter, US News and World Report comes up with a new linkbaiting exercise (yes – it worked, sort of), describing “political science and government” as the thirteenth most useless major. Me, if I were trying to categorize the “thirteen most […]

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A colleague pointed me to this feature article about political scientist James Fowler. According to reporter Delle Willett, “He’s been invited to the Microsoft CEO Summit, having dinner at Bill Gates’ house with him, Warren Buffet and 100 other CEOs around the country. . . . President Obama’s campaign recently invited Fowler to help with […]

Steve Pearlstein: There is a vigorous academic debate over whether negative advertising depresses or increases voter turnout. I suspect it does both, depressing turnout among moderates and independents while stimulating it at the ideological extremes. In that process, what has changed is the composition of the turnout rather than its overall level. From the Lau, […]

This weekend, former Nixon staffer Charles Colson died at the age of 80. Colson was, of course, well known for his Watergate-related crimes (as well as for his subsequent turn to Christian ministry) but it is worth noting too his contributions to what has become known as the “administrative presidency.” In Nixon’s day a number […]

Party disunity is so frequently a news story, but party unity is by far the norm.

Some links to reviews of the newest research.