Blog: The Monkey Cage

With everything going on in Russia, I thought it might be a good time to revisit exactly what we know about the political economy of post-communism. I was fortunate enough to attend a wonderful conference last week at George Washington University co-sponsored by PONARS Eurasia, IERES, and the Woodrow Wilson–Kennan Institute. on “Two Decades of […]

When voters discover the candidates’ Intrade probabilities, support shifts to Romney.

In our continuing series of election reports, we welcome Tim Haughton, a 2011-12 Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and Alenka Krasovec, an Associate Professor at the University of Ljubljana, with the following report on the December 2011 […]

Continuing our series of commentaries on recent developments in Russia, we are pleased to welcome the following guest post from Thomas Remington of Emory University: Press reports in both Russia and the US of the large-scale protests against election fraud in Moscow and other large cities are characterizing this movement as the political mobilization of […]

P. took the subway to Bowling Green. On his way to the exit, he passed a line of police officers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Outside, police had surrounded the “Charging Bull” with barricades and, a few blocks north, sealed off a stretch of Wall Street around the Stock Exchange. P. tried to look nonchalant as […]

Ben HIghton writes: Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). […]

I have an op-ed on Al Jazeera English in which I propose two different ways of thinking about recent events in Russia, both of which are based on theoretical arguments I have put forward in academic journals (see here and here) in recent years. One focuses on the ability of fraudulent elections to serve as […]

Academics think the press needs to cover interest groups, Congress, and compromise more, even when there’s a presidential election going on. 

Via Cosma in comments at the other place I hang out, this is a very nice teaching tool for the sole and single purpose of getting this point across to students. NB that you need to be logged into a Google ID to use it. My favorite so far is the .8222 correlation between my […]

A few months ago, we reported that Jim Campbell argues that Larry Bartels’s “Unequal Democracy” findings are not robust. Here’s the quick summary, which (I think) both Bartels and Campbell would agree with: – On average, the economy did a lot better under Democratic than Republican presidents in the first two years of the term. […]