Blog: The Monkey Cage

It is that time of the year again when undergraduates interested in a career in political science have to choose between PhD programs. I know from e-mails that The Monkey Cage is widely read among these students. I thought it would be nice to use our collective wisdom here to provide some advice, presuming that […]

The following guest post is from David Szakonyi, a PhD student at Columbia University who is currently conducting research in Moscow, Russia. These comments originally appeared here. Notwithstanding claims of minor electoral fraud, Putin’s first-round victory was dominant and nearly unquestionable. Granted, the regime-backed candidate scored fewer votes than he had in both the 2008 and […]

[Photo by Erik Herron] Couldn’t get enough of Super Tuesday? Well, imagine you could not only watch news reports roll in, but could also observe voters (and poll workers) around the country voting through live webcams in all polling stations. As I noted earlier this week, this was indeed the case in Russia’s presidential election […]

From Regina Smyth, a political scientist at Indiana University who is currently in Moscow and who observed the post-election protests first hand;  all views expressed below are those of the author. Preparations for Russian protests have taken on a very predictable pattern. First come the barriers and portable toilets, along with large vehicles (buses, trucks, riot […]

Myron Gutmann of the NSF gave a talk a few days ago on the implications of computational social science – the slides are here (thanks to David Lazer for sharing them). This should be of interest to anyone interested in applying for NSF funding – very clearly, this is going to be a significant research […]

From Ashley Croft and Joanne Palmer in The Lancet: Chi Pang Wen and colleagues claim that exercising for 15 min per day results in a 14% reduced risk of all-cause mortality (0·86, 95% CI 0·81—0·91). Further, they claim that every additional 15 min of daily exercise beyond the minimum daily amount of 15 min reduces […]

Take Five seeks to to invigorate the Public Diplomacy discussion with contributions from a wide range of authors, from experienced Public Diplomacy figures to scholars and young professionals newly venturing into the field. The site is a venue for fresh ideas about the way that America conducts its diplomatic relations abroad and about the impact […]

Displaying a predictive ability at a level of which my Americanist colleague can only dream, I think it is safe to say that most of the claims I made in my pre-election report on the 2012 Russian Presidential election have been substantiated: Vladimir Putin won. Multiple allegations have been raised that the election was neither […]

I haven’t linked to the Baby Name Wizard in awhile. . . . Laura Wattenberg takes a look at the question, “Does a hard-to-pronounce baby name hurt you?” Critical thinking without “debunking”—-this is the way to go.