Blog: The Monkey Cage

Here’s Gallup’s post.  The lede: Republicans’ enthusiasm about voting in the election for president next year has decreased, with 49% of Republicans and independents who lean Republican now saying they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, down from 58% in September. This narrows the gap between them and Democrats, 44% of whom are more […]

In the wake of mounting evidence of widespread fraud in Sunday’s elections for Russia’s Duma, protest movements calling for an annulment of the election’s results have begun to gather steam. Despite the arrest of nearly 800 demonstrators in Moscow and St. Petersburg this week, plans have now been drawn up for protests this Saturday (10 […]

It only took 18 months.  Here’s a Wall Street Journal story.  Hat tip to David Fortunato.  Here’s his earlier post on the subject.

More from Andrew Reynolds: Yesterday on the Monkey Cage I predicted how parties would split the first 168 seats up for grabs in the Egyptian People’s Assembly. We now have preliminary results from the run-off races in all bar two of the 56 majority district seats being contested. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party […]

Tom Bartlett describes the efforts of two psychologists to publish replication results for an article, which had purported to show that people could use ESP to predict whether they would be shown erotic pictures in the future. The replication found no observable effect, but (according to the authors’ account of it)had a difficult time finding […]

While the effective demise of other first-class correspondence has strengthened political mail so far, the broader obsolescence of the mail gives reason for long-term concerns. Campaigns have timed their mail programs under the assumption that voters check their mailboxes daily. This week’s announcement by the postal service that it would eliminate next-day delivery guarantees for […]

Insider trading in Congress is back in the news, this time because Congress is trying to set up more stringent regulations against it. The reason: Almost all of the 173 House members cosponsoring the legislation signed on following a 60 Minutes broadcast last month reporting that congressional lawmakers can enrich themselves through investments without fear […]

This is a guest post by Andrew Reynolds.  He is the Chair of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been an adviser on election design in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Jordan. He is the coauthor with Jason Brownlee and Tarek Masoud of the forthcoming book, The Arab Spring: […]

The following guest post is from revolutions expert Jack A. Goldstone of George Mason. Check out his new blog too. — No doubt the most difficult task in the months ahead for Western leaders responding to changes in the Arab world will be to stick to their guns on democracy — that is, to accord […]

By now, we all know the score in terms of Russian elections. An election is called, the state employs its “administrative resources” to ensure huge advantages for the ruling party or candidate, a little bit of fraud is added in when necessary (or a lot if you happen to live in Chechnya), and, voila! The […]