Blog: The Monkey Cage

Nicolas Sarkozy, will receive 48.1% of the vote in the second round of the French presidential election in May 2012 against 51.9% for the candidate of the moderate Left, the Socialist François Hollande. That is the forecast of political scientists Martial Foucault and Richard Nadeau, contingent on current trends in unemployment and Sarkozy’s current approval […]

When pundit and O.G. blogger Mickey Kaus ran a longshot campaign for the Senate a few years ago, I assumed he was doing so to gather material for a book. My reasoning was that his move from long-format journalism to blogging to microblogging to Twitter had reached its logical conclusion, and that he’d be more […]

Next time anyone complains that political science articles are too technical and dry, be sure to direct them to Keith Darden’s excellent 2008 Politics and Society article “The Integrity of Corrupt States: Graft as an Informal State Institution“, which contains the following passage from transcribed (secret) audio recordings from Ukraine (p.47): Kuchma: So then you […]

Many readers will remember the book The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.  It argues that Americans are increasingly clustered in like-minded political communities.  If one categorizes a county by how its residents voted in presidential elections, as of 2004 nearly half (48%) of Americans lived in “landslide” countries where one presidential candidate got at least […]

Following tomorrow’s Illinois primary, I assume there will be renewed calls for one of Santorum or Gingrich (and most likely the latter) to drop out of the race* in order for conservative Republicans to increase their influence on the nomination process. The logic of the argument is very intuitive: as long as Santorum and Gingrich […]

An election means renewed attention to the competence or ignorance of Americans—e.g., here or here.  So it’s a good time to highlight a new paper on the topic by Christopher Elmendorf and David Schleicher: This paper examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and […]

I just wanted to highlight this New York Times article by Binyamin Applebaum about the political impact of gas prices.  It’s a very judicious take on the available evidence—one that doesn’t downplay the importance that gas prices may have to consumers, but doesn’t hype how much gas prices can affect presidents and presidential elections.  From […]

This is a guest post by Georgetown political scientist Michael Bailey. ***** Can presidents influence public opinion?  This is one of the biggest questions in political science because how we answer the question shapes what we think presidents should and will do with their time in office. Ezra Klein, channeling George Edwards, says no.  Kevin […]

A Monkey Cage reader writes: I realize that this might seem like a partisan-motivated question for the generally non-partisan Monkey Cage, but I was wondering if someone could do a post which would attempt to explain (a) why so many companies have chosen to take their advertisements from Limbaugh’s show after the Fluke Fiasco (i.e. […]