Blog: The Monkey Cage

Genomics is clearly one of the most interesting developing subfields of science with potential implications for political behavior. The trouble is that it is extremely difficult for political scientists to discriminate sensible applications from nonsensical ones. Many arguments (both pro and con) make sense to me because they are written by very smart people who […]

The organizers of the West Coast Experiments Conference send along the following announcement: The fifth annual meeting of the West Coast Experiments Conference will be held at the Claremont Resort, near the campus of UC Berkeley, on Friday, May 11, 2012. For information on registration and local arrangements, please visit: http://ps-experiments.ucr.edu/conference/western. We encourage anyone with […]

Regular readers will note that, as in 2008, I’ve been doing a lot of campaign-related blogging, both here and at Model Politics.   For once, it’s going to serve a larger purpose than this. I’m pleased to say that UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and I will be writing a book on the 2012 election, […]

This is a guest post from political scientist and mascotologist Tobin Grant.  The image is mine. ***** Since I like being part of an NCAA bracket pool but hate to lose money, I’ve often entered a “mascot” bracket because most people let me put in for free. Consider it the worst possible bracket. Slate has […]

Konstantin Sonin of the New Economic School in Moscow sent along the following in response to my request for comments on the 2012 Russian presidential election: I wrote a piece for FREE Policy Brief, a joint project of a Swedish, Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, and Polish think tanks, where detailed my election impressions – comments are […]

The following post-election report on Saturday’s 2012 Slovak elections is co-authored by Kevin Deegan-Krause, Associate Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University, and Tim Haughton, Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies & Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Central and Eastern Europe, University of Birmingham. Perhaps the most […]

My latest post at Model Politics looks at public knowledge of three recent political events: Santorum’s statement about birth control, Obama’s call to Sandra Fluke, and Santorum’s comment about Obama’s snobbery.  The survey data show an unsurprising, but often forgotten, fact: a substantial fraction of Americans aren’t so riveted by this campaign that they know […]

This is a guest post from Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler. ***** In response to John’s earlier post showing Bush failed to persuade the public to go to war with Iraq, a Monkey Cage reader writes: “I have a hard time believing that presidential assertion [Iraq involvement in 9/11], filtered through staff and the […]

Larry Arnhart has an informative and detailed post on the debate  I highlighted last week about the possible genetic determinants of voting behavior. The whole post is worth a read. Here is the key passage: In both of these debates, the opposing sides employ the rhetoric of arguing against a “straw man.”  Charney criticizes his […]

In an article about Obama’s recent meeting with New York mayor Bloomberg, Thomas Ferguson writes the following about a well-funded third party effort: Last year a group, Americans Elect, surfaced with a plan that strikingly resembled one of the schemes of 2008. . . . Once again, the media response was enthusiastic: Thomas Friedman of […]