Blog: The Monkey Cage

Incumbent Party’s Expected Vote Margin = 1.14 −.83 × (Years in Office) +4.51 × (4th-Year Income Growth) +1.66 × (3rd-Year Income Growth) −1.04 × (2nd-Year Income Growth) −2.34 × (1st-Year Income Growth) Most of the ingredients in this recipe for success at the polls are very familiar to students of American presidential elections. The incumbent party […]

We are pleased to welcome Larry Bartels as an occasional contributor at The Monkey Cage.  He is Professor of Political Science and Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University.  His most recent book, Unequal Democracy, was the subject of a roundtable here on the blog.  A copy of his vita is […]

If you crunch the numbers, Republicans are more ideologically consistent than Democrats—but not by much.

The media and financial markets are abuzz over the decision of the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s decision to hold a referendum on whether to approve the current EU bail out plan for Greece and its many conditions for reform and austerity in Greece (see for example here, here, and here). While most attention is […]

According to Chris Wilson, there are two versions of the report of the Occupy Wall Street poll from so-called hack pollster Doug Schoen. Here’s the report that Azi Paybarah says that Schoen sent to him, and here’s the final question from the poll: And here’s what’s on Schoen’s own website: Very similar, except for that […]

Will the recent recognition of the country by UNESCO lead to full membership in the General Assembly?

My new post at 538 discusses a forthcoming paper by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Arthur Simon.  They argue that certain kinds of previous experience, including military service and tenure as the governor of a large state, are associated with “presidential greatness,” as gauged by surveys of historians.  “Washington outsiders,” by contrast, fare poorly. The […]

John gives some reasons why viewers of the political scene might think that congressional Republicans are more disciplined than their Democratic counterparts, even if this isn’t really so. I’d like to give one more big reason based on recent history. When Barack Obama became president, congressional Republicans implemented a solid No strategy and were successful […]

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome the following post-election report from Theresa Reidy of University College Cork: ******************** Michael D Higgins was elected the ninth President of Ireland on Saturday, 29 October 2011 with over one million votes. Higgins was the candidate from the Labour Party, the second largest […]