Blog: The Monkey Cage

United Russia, Russia’s ruling party, saw its popularity drop by nine points this week and then released the following online add: The tag line? “Let’s Do it Together” [h/t to Brian Whitmore, Israel Marques, and Scott Gehlbach, who wants this to be immediately nominated for most unusual campaign advertisement.]

Earlier this week, I raised the issue that there might be some tension between the sudden savior status of technocratic government and traditional notions of democratic accountability. Thus it was with great interest that I read the lead to the AP story on Italy’s likely incoming new – “TECHNOCRATIC” – Prime Minister, Mario Monti: Italy’s […]

Daron Shaw, Matt Grossmann, and Keena Lipsitz, and I have a newly published text on campaign and elections that might be of interest to some readers.  It’s intended for classroom use and would, I think, be appropriate for advanced high school students or undergraduates.  We tried in the book to do three things.  First, we […]

Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here. I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably […]

Elmo Roper, 1962: It may be human to err, but to err time and time again, in precisely the same way, is folly of divine dimensions. I am talking about journalists—when they tackle the job of predicting elections. Though their impressionistic predictions often land them in electoral soup, journalists keep on preferring the intuition of […]

We are delighted to welcome back UCSD professor Barbara Walter and her colleague, professor Alberto Díaz-Cayeros.  Professor Díaz-Cayeros is an expert on Mexico and professor Walter is an expert on insurgency. Below they combine their respective sources of expertise and analyze the violence in Mexico as a form of insurgency. ## President Obama and his […]

Shrinking the president.  Amen. Critiquing the media critics. Most honest political ad ever. Liberals aren’t so bad at economics after all. How men can dance all sexy.

This is a guest post from my colleagues Brandon Bartels and Jake Haselswerdt, which is substantially more interesting than the title that I gave the post: In response to Suzanne Mettler’s post on Monday, commenter Josh asked for clarification regarding the importance of policy delivery mechanism (e.g., direct cash payment vs. tax break) to citizen […]

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jon Huntsman, back in September, loving all over Captain Beefheart and specifically referring to Trout Mask Replica.  Wow.  That has to be the most non-mainstream musical identification (cf. party identification) ever given by a U.S. presidential candidate.  And a Republican to boot. What’s the logic whereby you are willing to say that, […]