Blog: The Monkey Cage

Lavine and his colleagues designed an online survey and got responses from a sample of about 800 citizens, including many who expressed sympathy for the Tea Party and many who did not. The survey asked about programs designed to help people who can’t keep up with their mortgage payments stay in their homes… But the […]

I think the press is way too focused on media strategies — both as they say in the business paid media and earned media — and way too little on grassroots organizing and the so-called “ground game” of politics. Interest groups get under-covered tremendously. There’s also kind of moralism in political journalism; that there are […]

See here. (Run it through Google translate if, like me, you don’t know any Russian.) I don’t know anything here, will defer to the experts on this one.

The entrails of the Arab Spring suggest that Assad will be the fifth dictator to fall only if the Syrian military irrevocably splits or if international military force intervenes on the side of the opposition. Neither looks likely. The Syrian army is dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority and foreign powers have demonstrated no stomach to […]

We are delighted to welcome the following guest post from Johannes Urpelainen, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, on the recent climate negotiations in Durban. Johannes is a very prolific scholar who writes on issues of international institutions and the environment. He also writes a blog on climate politics. **** In recent […]

“Record High Anti-Incumbent Sentiment,” Gallup reports.  Here’s a graph: Well, we went through this in 2010, and the reelection rate of incumbents was still 87%—a little lower than in most elections since 1970, but hardly low. In 2012, I’m even less convinced that anti-incumbency sentiment will actually get incumbents out of office.   What happened in […]

For those interested in a quick primer on recent developments in Russia, here’s a guide to our posts today: Andrew Little on applications to Russia of theories of non-competitive elections Sam Greene on how Putinism has come to violate Russia’s non-interference social contract Regina Smyth on the dangers of over-simplifying Russian politics Konstantin Sonin on […]

Finally (at least for today), we present the following response to the Russian parliamentary elections from Andrew Little, a Ph.D. candidate at NYU who is writing a dissertation on noncompetitive elections. In response to my queries, Andrew offered the following six points in response to the 2011 Russian elections: 1. Noncompetitive elections—those where the ultimate […]

Our next report on the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections comes from Konstantin Sonin of the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia. These comments originally appeared at Free Policy Briefs. ******* Days before December 4, prospects of electoral democracy in Russia looked bleak. Consolidation of the authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since 1999, […]

Conservatives hate him because he’s a liberal Democrat, liberals hate him because he’s a Wall Street leech. The funny thing is, if Corzine had stayed on in the Senate, he’d probably be an extremely well-respected figure, deferred to by his colleagues and the press as an expert on how to fix the financial mess. Corzine’s […]