Blog: The Monkey Cage

This time, it’s the president of Hungary: Pal Schmitt, a former Olympic fencing champion, announced his resignation during an address to the lower house of the Hungarian parliament, after days of defiance in the face of calls for him to step down.  Last week Semmelweis University revoked Mr Schmitt’s doctorate after a special committee concluded […]

In the past I had success using the Monkey Cage to crowd-source a bibliography, so I thought I would try today to see if it would work for data as well. A graduate student in my department is looking for any source (or several) that may have looked at local-level executive and/or legislative elections in […]

NPR’s science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, put together a nice short piece on negative ads.   Find it here.  It includes a couple quotes from me—building off of things I’ve written previously. One brief follow-up.  The piece pivots off of  a statement by political scientist Joseph Heim, who says that negative ads can be effective for undecided […]

Or at the very least, University of Michigan political scientist Jenna Bednar is! Her question appeared in the NY Times Magazine’s The Ethicist column this weekend, when she asked: Given the mounting evidence of long-term and even fatal effects of brain injuries incurred by professional football players, is it ethical for us to watch the […]

During election season, some groups of potential voters get more attention than others. Iowa farmers, New Hampshire veterans, and Florida space enthusiasts, for example, all received special treatment from Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Republican primaries. Beyond the state-by-state pandering, there is legitimate concern that policymakers may listen much more closely to constituencies that participate […]

Matt Glassman: The problem with email, though, is that you can’t tell if the sender is from the district or not. And there are quite obvious incentives to not exclude anyone who might be a constituent. And so the incoming email has a tendency to nationalize the constituent communications techniques used in most Member offices; […]

Readers may have heard of the controversy about why the Mormon Church previously banned blacks from the priesthood—particularly a “folk doctrine” described by BYU religion professor Randy Bott in this article.  Slate summarizes Bott’s comments thusly: Bott cited the Old Testament anti-heroes Cain and Canaan, whom Christians of many denominations long believed to be cursed […]

Political scientists Kevin Clarke and David Primo placed an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times arguing that the social sciences need to overcome their ‘physics envy.’ I take the main point to be that we ought to value theoretical contributions even if we cannot directly test their empirical implications. Vice versa, we can learn a […]

During the recent controversy over the Obama administration’s rules on contraception coverage in health insurance plans, representatives of American Catholics played a large role. This was a rare moment in the sun for the most prominent Catholic interest group in the U.S., the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholic hospitals were also involved but there […]