Blog: The Monkey Cage

…we’re extraordinarily happy to announce one of the most significant milestones in the history of Open States: as of today, all 50 states (as well as DC and Puerto Rico) are now supported via our API and bulk downloads. This makes Open States the first and only completely open, completely free resource for accessing legislative […]

Paul Ryan’s budget would cut a lot of government spending.  It would cut entitlement spending.  It would cut aid to the poor, transportation, education, veterans benefits, and scientific research.  There have been plenty of responses to the budget, positive and negative.  But only a couple that I’ve seen—Jon Bernstein’s and Stan Collender’s—anticipate this potential problem: […]

This is a response by Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort, to the critique of Abrams and Fiorina.  I blogged about that critique here.  The links below are mine. ***** Before Bob Cushing and I published our first article in the Austin newspaper on sorting in 2004, we heard Dr. Fiorina wouldn’t like it. […]

More from Gallup is here.

The following election report is written by Devesh Tiwari, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at UC-San Diego, and appeared previously at Fruits and Votes. **** Over a three week period, approximately 60 percent of India’s Uttar Pradesh region’s 126 million eligible voters participated in state level elections that took place in seven stages, making […]

Much hope is vested in the ability of so-called smart sanctions to convince Iranian authorities to abandon their nuclear ambitions and to persuade Syrian authorities to step aside and stop abusing their population. Smart sanctions are designed to limit negative humanitarian consequences to civilian populations. Instead, they target elites whose support is crucial for the […]

Here is a lengthy NPR story on how racial attitudes affect views of health care reform.  It features the research of Michael Tesler.  The abstract of the paper: This study argues that President Obama’s strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, […]

Ben Bernanke came to GW today, giving the first of his four lectures this month to a group of thirty lucky  undergrads enrolled in a GW course about the Federal Reserve and its place in the modern political economy.  Bernanke has been eager to demystify the Fed, and in doing so, to bolster the Fed’s […]

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? This paper studies the effect of the Tea Party movement in the United States, which rose to prominence through a series of rallies across the country on April 15, Tax Day, 2009. To identify the causal effect of protests, […]

Freakonomics. Hot hand. Economics & Freudian psychology. Ranking philosophy departments. Actual philosophy.