Blog: The Monkey Cage

We are excited to welcome the following guest post from Lindsay Heger and Idean Salehyan. ***************** One year after the start of the Arab Spring, we have seen tremendous variation in the outcome of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East.  Though not entirely peaceful, political reform in Tunisia and Morocco stand in stark […]

Just in time for tomorrow’s celebration of Pi Day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has given the Senate its own special math problem.  Reid filed cloture motions yesterday on 17 nominees to the U.S. District Courts currently pending on the Senate’s Executive Calendar.  If Democrats secure sixty votes on each cloture vote, the Senate […]

Larry Lessig, Ezra Klein, and an anonymous Economist writer have been debating the relative importance of campaign spending and gerrymandering on partisan polarization.   Unfortunately, the exchange is fairly heavy on conjecture and lighter on evidence.  Because these are topics on which I have written a bit, I thought I might provide a few pieces of […]

Ezra Klein’s new piece on presidential persuasion is stimulating a lot of debate.  I’ll have more to say.  But let me make one small point in response to Kevin Drum’s critique.  Drum writes: I also think that Ezra doesn’t really grapple with the strongest arguments on the other side. For one thing, although there are […]

David Sparks has some very nice maps of public opinion data. What’s impressive is how they combine data sparsity (which also gives us a rough and ready estimate of how the population is distributed) with information on respondents’ party ID. Via Cosma Shalizi.

iGov would offer citizens an easy way to track their relationship with the federal government over their lifetimes. Each citizen would have his or her own iGov account, through which the federal government would be able to present the accumulation of the benefits that a person has ever received from across the government. A single […]

President Obama is paying a significant political price for having increased the tax burden on middle-class Americans. Fair enough—except that he hasn’t. My latest Model Politics post focuses on disparities in perceptions of national conditions and their political implications. One of the questions in a recent YouGov survey asked whether “the tax burden on middle-class […]

But I suspect that most political scientists start these conversations the same way: the main barrier to participation in the United States is not technological, its attitudinal.  As long as most Americans don’t find politics and elections central to their daily lives, then even the simplest, most innovative, most socially networked elections system will not […]

As reactions for, and against the Invisible Children campaign against Joseph Kony convulse blogs and Twitter, it may be no harm to turn to what political scientists have to say. Bernd Beber and Chris Blattman have a paper under submission on the logic of child soldiering that draws on a major data gathering project which […]

I got the following in the email: Bush-Obama America There are 272 Bush-Obama counties across the country. George W. Bush carried these counties in 2000 and 2004. In 2008, Barack Obama won them. Now where do they go in 2012? I [David Dent] am launching a blog to focus on these pivotal counties to the […]