Blog: The Monkey Cage

In collaboration with political scientists Amber Boydstun (University of California, Davis) and Rebecca Glazier (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), and Matthew Pietryka (University of California, Davis), React Labs is planning an educational package for use by instructors during one or more of the presidential or vice-presidential debates in October. React Labs™ is a new […]

Tobin Grant: The Democratic 2012 platform was not its first to exclude “God” from a platform. Indeed, references to God were absent from all Democratic Party platforms between 1960 until 1996. There was also no mention of God in the 1972 Republican platform. Until recently, those platforms that did mention God did so in small […]

Dan Drezner argues that foreign policy matters in two ways in this election: Barack Obama is viewed as more competent than Mitt Romney on foreign policy; Democrats and Republicans have pretty similar foreign policy views and where they differ, independents are closer to Obama’s than to Romney’s stated foreign policy positions ; I think Dan is […]

Bill Clinton earned rave reviews for his convention speech, in which he skewered Republicans for failing “the arithmetic test” as well as “the values test.” Of course, appeals to facts and logic play well with pundits. But it is much less clear that they are persuasive to voters. Thomas Edsall has a fascinating piece today on […]

From sociologist Lane Kenworthy. This is good stuff; there was a lot there that I didn’t know before.

The kerfuffle over the removal and then reintroduction  in the Democratic platform of a reference to Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israelis seems like a perfect example of how foreign policy sometimes does stop at the water’s edge. Both party platforms endorse Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital. Large bipartisan majorities in both the House and […]

We are delighted to welcome the following guest post from Eric M. Patashnik of the University of Virginia ************************************************************* One of the key strategic moves that Bill Clinton made in his convention speech was to draw attention to the GOP’s plans to block grant Medicaid, which has been overshadowed by the debate over Medicare reform. As […]

The current issue of Perspectives on Politics includes a symposium which I organized (i.e. I invited the participants and wrote the foreword), on UCLA political scientist Timothy Groseclose’s Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, which builds in part on his earlier research with Milyo. Links below: Brendan Nyhan argues that there […]

Peter Baker’s thoughtful “lessons learned” piece on the Obama first term in yesterday’s NY Times suggests that the President might have done well to add some political science classics to his pre-inaugural reading list in 2008-09. (It is, of course, never too late!) Generally, “Mr. Obama in private sometimes expresses surprise at the constraints of […]

Mike Horowitz and Philip Tetlock in Foreign Policy: Academic research suggests that predicting events five years into the future is so difficult that most experts perform only marginally better than dart-throwing chimps. Now imagine trying to predict over spans of 15 to 20 years. Sisyphus arguably had it easier. But that has not deterred the intelligence […]