Blog: The Monkey Cage

Since James Carville famously wrote “The Economy, Stupid” in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters, the mass public has become increasingly familiar with what is one of the more important “facts” discovered by political scientists: US presidential elections are undoubtedly affected by the state of the economy. The question of which part of the economy matters most, […]

‘Tis the season to file tax returns—but is it also the season to blame taxes for our economic troubles? For decades, the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumer Attitudes has been asking Americans by phone about their family’s financial situation—and about the reasons behind it. But among those Americans who report being worse off, taxes […]

From Brendan Nyhan: Pre-accept articles. Choose a random sample of articles and “audit” them by replicating them. Give “frequent flyer” points to scholars who are particularly diligent in helping journals, e.g., via peer review. I think these ideas are interesting.  At this point, given the many dysfunctions in scholarly publishing, let’s be honest: it’s time […]

Amidst all of today’s silly discussion of the presidential horserace—silly because of the limited predictive power of trial heat polls at this point—I haven’t really seen anyone draw attention to this: I mean the party breakdown.  Remember when Obama was going to lose the support of all those Democrats dissatisfied with his weak-kneed compromises?  And […]

Show up at one of these—and, as best as I can tell, I am the only journalist in America who does routinely—and one may actually come away wiser. You might have second thoughts about some of the media’s ironclad assumptions as we dissect politics, especially in an election year, not to mention learning a lot […]

It is hardly surprising that voters’ moods and their assessments of the incumbent president are strongly colored by current economic conditions. From the standpoint of good government, however, their myopic focus on current conditions seems quite counter-productive. On one hand, myopic economic voting provides little electoral incentive for presidents to generate income growth through most […]

As the saying goes, everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. Or, to put in political terms, people want lower taxes and more government services—with the gap filled, presumably, with a mixture of borrowed funds and savings realized by cutting government waste. In their new book “Class War? What Americans Really […]

Louis Menand writes: Once, when winters were cold and the world seemed large, creatures roamed the earth who were permissive on social issues and at ease with big government, yet remained ever faithful to the gods of business and finance. Their principles were abstract but broad-minded: tolerance, free trade, and a belief in something called […]

Instead of the internet promoting fundamental political change, it seems to reinforce political change in countries that already have at least some level of democratic freedoms. Internet use is a less effective means to mobilize citizens for democracy in extremely authoritarian countries. That’s Erik Nisbet, commenting on a new study with Elizabeth Stoycheff and Katy […]