Blog: The Monkey Cage

James Fallows writes, “Try to think back to when sophisticated people thought that Sarah Palin was the key to Republican victory.” All I can say is, Fallows wasn’t hanging out with the right sort of sophisticates! Overall, Fallows’s article seems fine to me; I was just struck by that offhand remark about Palin. I have […]

I remember when I heard that Ronald Reagan had appointed a guy named Ling to be Secretary of Agriculture, I thought, Cool—-he appointed an Asian. Then it turned out that it was actually a white guy named Lyng.

That’s Rick Santorum talking about the American welfare state. But who, really, is hooked—and how does that matter politically? Yesterday’s New York Times featured a long, meaty article on the distribution of federal benefits. One of the more striking points, drawing on work by political scientist Dean Lacy, is that government benefits constitute a larger […]

Columbia University Professor David Stark sends along the following comments on both the evolving situation in Hungary and a recent article of note by the eminent Hungarian scholar Jnos Kornai which appeared in the Hungarian newspaper Népszbadság on January 28, 2012, and is being made available in English for the first time on The Monkey Cage […]

A story is here.  Some sample quotes: Ms. Harris-Perry will be the only tenured professor in the United States — and one of a very small number of African-American women — who serves as a cable news host… …In an interview that day, she recounted numerous times when she had watched political strategists on TV […]

 Political scientists are much better-looking than economists.

There are many, many tales that can be told about this subject.  Here is one, from Megan Reif: After calling and showing up in person at various city and county offices in Newark on multiple occasions, it took going through back-channels on the city council in 2006 (pre-Cory Booker administration) to get Newark’s archived precinct-level […]

Following up on this and this, Paul Gronke writes: There is a fairly active literature on attitudes of military personnel. The bulk of the literature has come out of sociology, much of it inspired by the pioneering work of Morris Janowitz (Chicago) and Charles Moskos (Northwestern, passed away in 2008). The primary academic journal in […]

We welcome the following election report from Professor Julie George of Queens College on the ongoing debacle in South Ossetia (a break-away republic of Georgia, currently recognized as an independent state by five countries: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, and Tuvalu). For those of you not quite familiar with where exactly South Ossetia is, we have […]