Blog: The Monkey Cage

Political scientists, so far as I know, aren’t typically on the guest list for the Kansas City Fed’s economic symposium in Jackson Hole.   (But honestly, who in their right mind would give up a trip to New Orleans in a hurricane for a weekend in the Grand Tetons?)   Coverage of this year’s conference though reminds […]

Pippa Norris sends along the following announcement: ************** We are in the process of developing a new survey monitoring expert Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) and we need your help! The survey plans to contact c.40 experts immediately after each national election (constituent assembly, presidential or parliamentary) to gather views about these contests. Experts will be drawn […]

I’m used to hearing the argument that, sure, cigarettes are addictive, but everyone has known forever that smoking caused cancer, and that cigarette manufacturers could hardly be blamed for supplying a consumer good that many people wanted. So I was surprised to learn the following, from historian Robert Proctor: It’s interesting to see that, at […]

Journalists tend to mistake the part of the campaign that is exposed to their view — the candidate’s travel and speeches, television ads, public pronouncements of spokesmen and surrogates — for the entirety of the enterprise. They treat elections almost exclusively as an epic strategic battle to win hearts and minds whose primary tools are […]

He scores higher than Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin!

Don’t even think about turning in your fantasy presidential race drafts until after the Democratic convention. 

Eastwooding from buzzfeed Eastwooding @FastLaugh: “Give Clint Eastwood a break… The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair..” Obama’s response to Eastwooding at lockerz.com And of course, The Simpson’s did it first: ****** Update, OK, turns out the Simpson’s cartoon was edited – original version is “Old Man Yells […]

Simon Jackman posted the following graphic on his blog, which earned a rave review from Lynn Vavrek on Twitter and a lengthy discussion by Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post. I admit the graphic is a great – sums up a lot of information incredibly concisely to present a quite coherent story – but I […]

For our purposes, I’ll define a hack as someone who writes something he or she does not believe (or who carefully looks the other way to avoid encountering any facts that might get in the way). The purest example of a hack I can think of is John Gribbin, a physics Ph.D. who many years […]

I just received this book by Arthur Brooks in the mail. I think he knows a lot about politics—he has a friend who’s a congressman (see p. 139). On page 160, Brooks writes: The retirement age is absurdly low. Unless you are in a heavy physical industry or have a health issue, why should you […]