Blog: The Monkey Cage

3 Quarks Daily are holding a competition for best blogpost in politics and the social sciences, with Stephen Walt judging, and a $1,000 prize for the winner. Details below. Feel free to nominate one of our posts if you feel so moved; but feel equally or more free to nominate posts by less-well known blogs […]

Scott Page at University of Michigan is offering a free graded course on ‘thinking with models.’ We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense […]

The general election for president is predictable from the fundamentals (for individuals and at the aggregate level), primaries not so much. Presidential general election campaigns have several distinct features that distinguish them from most other elections: 1. Two major candidates; 2. The candidates clearly differ in their political ideologies and in their positions on economic […]

Taking a break from forecasting the US Presidential elections, we are pleased to welcome back David Jandura, a graduate student at Georgetown University, with the following guest post on forecasting the Egyptian elections: Although it is difficult to predict many aspects of Egypt’s parliamentary election, most observers assume that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will win […]

Number of stories in Lexis-Nexis with words “Barney Frank and “prostitute” that were published between August 25 and October 4, 1989: 302. The percentage of people who answered “no” or “I don’t know” or gave an incorrect answer when asked “Do you happen to know who Barney Frank is?” in an Oct. 5-8, 1989 Times […]

Jeremy Peters discusses the GOP’s ad campaign against Obama, which is well underway.  I find this reporting necessary and valuable, but Peters misses an opportunity here: But going negative so early also carries substantial risks. One is that many voters are not yet paying much attention to the campaign and will not do so until […]

In response to the lively debate between the New York Times and The Monkey Cage (1, 2, 3), we are pleased to welcome Victoria Shineman, a Ph.D. candidate in NYU’s Politics Department who is writing a dissertation on the effects of compulsory voting. In this guest post, she offers both a clarification of how participation […]

As Gingrich soars in the polls, the libertarian stalwart plummets.

The ten Fortune 100 companies that lobbied on 50 or more bills since 2008 paid an average effective tax rate of 17.1 percent in 2010; the ten companies that lobbied on between 25 and 49 bills paid an average effective tax rate of 18.0 percent; the remaining publicly-traded companies paid an average effective tax rate […]

Apparently I’m not the only person to question some of the political writing in the London Review of Books. But, the latest fight between author Niall Ferguson (encountered on this blog several years ago) and reviewer Pankaj Mishra (link from Tyler Cowen) is fascinating. Usually when I see one of these exchanges of letters, it’s […]