Blog: The Monkey Cage

Monkey Cage contributor Erica Chenowth and Maria Stephan’s book was just named to The Guardian’s “Best Books of 2011,” thanks to Steven Pinker.  He writes: Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia). Gandhi was right, not just morally but empirically: nonviolent resistance is three times more effective than violence. Congratulations, Erica!

I’ve heard all sorts of scare stories of what it’s like to speak in an academic economics seminar: they’re rude, they interrupt constantly, they don’t let you get through three slides in an hour, etc. But whenever I’ve actually spoke in an economics department, the people have been polite and well-behaved, really it’s been like […]

Always check your evidence.

There may be all kinds of things wrong with law schools but they sure have figured out how to run an applications process. You submit one letter for a student, answer a few questions about how to rank students compared to others, and that’s it! By contrast, each policy school and PhD program has its […]

Here is another “not my field” question about the really interesting debate going on on this blog and others, concerning presidential election forecasting models and the question of how much campaigns matter versus the state of economy.  Basically, I’ve never understood what all you adepts mean when you argue about whether “campaigns matter.” We can […]

Political scientist Andrew Reynolds, in the New York Times: Egypt, the largest and most important country to overthrow its government during the Arab Spring, is careening toward a disastrous parliamentary election that begins on Nov. 28 and could bring the country to the brink of civil war. Why?  Part of the problem is the wrong […]

“What we’re doing is, by hand, going through the political science journals and reaching out to people and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think we should include?’ And then try to boil it down to some core studies on topics of interest,” Wihbey said. “Maybe it’s the case that some of the more sophisticated reporters […]

This post is jointly written with Anton Strezhnev, a very bright Georgetown undergraduate. One of the challenges in forecasting elections is that economic data are often inaccurate when first released. Some of the adjustments are substantial.  Just to illustrate this point, the image below (source) shows the change from original issue to current estimate in […]