Blog: The Monkey Cage

As the world digests the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il, an interesting and unresolved questions is raised for observers of politics: how much influence does any one person ever really have over the evolution of politics in a country, a region, or even the whole global political systems? From our earliest days in […]

The short answer: not very well.  That’s the subject of my first post over at the Washington Post’s polling blog, Behind the Numbers.  It features this graph from Lynn Vavreck and Michael LaCour.  Below is the graph.  See the post for more.

It’s true! I read it in the Times.

As promised, here is the second part of Professor Andrew Barnes’ overview of how the field of the political-economy of post-communism has evolved over the past 20 years. In the last several years, analysts have begun to explain how post-communist political economies work in practice.  A central theme of many of these writings is the […]

Whenever I am tempted to despair of political science, I pause to consider what very smart people who can’t be bothered are apt to get up to. Today’s example comes from the august interdiscipinary journal Science, where biologists are busy drawing conclusions about uninformed citizens and democratic consensus from the behavior of golden shiners. The […]

We are pleased to welcome professors Charles Tien of Hunter College and Michael Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa with what we hope will be a regular feature on The Monkey Cage over the next 12 months: their current “nowcast” of the 2012 presidential election. In contrast to the usual election forecasting approaches, we offer […]

My new post at 538 looks at some new research on the political attitudes of the very wealthy.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are different than the proverbial 99%!