Blog: The Monkey Cage

Lane Kenworthy writes: The book is full of graphs that support the above claims. One thing I like about Kenworthy’s approach is that he performs a separate analysis to examine each of his hypotheses. A lot of social scientists seem to think that the ideal analysis will conclude with a big regression where each coefficient […]

With Rick Perry now in 4th place in GOP polls, I wanted to share this reminder of his glory days in Texas gubernatorial politics before it was too late. The attached radio ad comes from his 2006 reelection campaign against former congressman Chris Bell. Perry won 39%-30% (with two strong independent candidates, bizarrely including Kinky […]

We are delighted to welcome the following guest post from Nathan Jensen (Washington University) and Edmund Malesky (UCSD). The post looks, among others, at whether governor Perry was more likely to award grants to businesses that offered campaign contributions. ***** We have been working on a series of projects on the political benefits of using […]

This is a guest post by political scientist David Peterson of Iowa State University. The allegations about Herman Cain became public on October 31.  Two colleagues and I were fortunate to have a poll of registered Republican and independent voters in Iowa go into the field the very next day, on November 1.  We interviewed […]

Since Josh is temporarily unavailable, I am posting this election round-up by Raj Chari, who is a Senior Lecturer (the Irish equivalent of associate professor) in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, in his stead. The centre-right Partido Popular (PP), under the leadership of Mariano Rajoy, won an absolute majority in Spain’s general election on […]

This is a guest post by political scientists Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman. The Supreme Court has reinserted itself in the heart of domestic politics by agreeing to review the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).  How is the Court likely to rule?  Consider two scenarios. The first scenario relies on a prominent theory […]

I enjoy the London Review of Books but I’m not a fan of their policy of hiring English people to write about U.S. politics. In theory it could work just fine but in practice there seem to be problems. Recall the notorious line from a couple years ago, “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear […]

A new book by Tanni Haas interviews 20 political bloggers and gets their thoughts.  Here is one from Tyler Cowen on how to have a successful blog: It needs to be updated regularly and to some extent be self-critical or self-reflective. And the person should read widely on the Web. That’s a requirement. There are […]

The latest rounds of “nerdfight”—Seth Masket vs. Sean Trende, Nate Silver vs. Ron Klain vs. Nate Silver vs. Brendan Nyhan, and also Harry Enten—are instructive in many ways.  I want to weigh in with some points that I feel are getting short shrift. A lot of the discussion has centered on the value of particular […]