Blog: The Monkey Cage

Josh asks about political opinions of U.S. military personnel. Jason Dempsey and Bob Shapiro have done some work on this. Here’s Dempsey’s website, and here’s something he wrote a few years ago that’s relevant to the discussion: The Military Times released the results of a survey showing that members of the armed services planned to […]

Chris Blattman: One fabulously rich person (or a gaggle of them) would put X million dollars into a trust that expires November 9th. X would have to be very large. Probably several hundred million. The rules would be simple. You could choose a funding cap for all candidates, x, which is much, much smaller than […]

In a post earlier this week, I asked whether anyone had conducted research regarding the voting behavior of US military personnel. Major Jim Golby, an Instructor in the Department of Social Science at the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Stanford Ph.D., kindly sent along the following response. Please be aware that […]

Yesterday’s House approval of a line-item veto bill (HR 3521) continues our national reprise of the budget politics of the 1990s—complete with Newt Gingrich, but probably without the rather important denouement of ultimate compromise and budget surplus. It is worth thinking about the structure and likely outcome of line-item veto proposals. Given the importance of […]

All over Western Europe people are relieved by the forecast that this weekend will bring some much needed relieve from a severe spell of cold weather. In the Netherlands, however, the same forecast is met with much regret as it probably ends the hope that this year, for the first time in fifteen years, we […]

It is not shaping up to be a great week for either Vladimir Putin or Mitt Romney. Putin had to deal with the spectrum of yet another mass protest against his rule – and in extremely adverse weather conditions, making the protest all the more impressive – and Romney faced the somewhat humiliating spectacle of […]

Monkey Cage reader Michael Moschella writes in with the following interesting observation in light of last night’s bad night for Mitt Romney: El Paso County is home to Colorado Springs and a top “military bastion” county in America. According to Wikipedia, El Paso County’s population surpassed Denver County in 2010, making it the most populous […]

I appreciate Michael Beckley’s response to my earlier post. I think his International Security article offers a useful corrective to an alarmist declinist perspective and has deservedly generated much debate. But it still seems pretty clear to me that China has indeed been catching up with the United States over the past decade. Let me […]

This is a guest post from political scientist Jeremy Pressman: ***** While President Barack Obama said on Sunday that the United States would make sure to  “work in lockstep” with Israel to solve the Iranian nuclear question, a difference of opinion apparently has emerged between Israel and the United States. The Obama administration is leaning […]