Reuters 1, New York Times 0
See here.
December 30, 2009
December 14, 2009
Twitteo killed the bloggio star
I’ve seen the future of Liebling optimality, and it ain’t pretty.
A. J. Liebling (author of The Honest Rainmaker and many other classics) once boasted, “I can write faster than anyone who can write better and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” I’ve long admired this sentiment, as has political journalist Mickey Kaus, who has lived it by moving from magazine and book writing to blogging and, now, twittering.
I’m worried, though, now that Kaus’s blogging has become more twitter-like, that he’s approaching a logical extreme of Liebling optimality, which is to make his posts shorter and shorter and faster and faster until he’s reduced to sitting at his keyboard, posting single characters, one at a time, very rapidly:
e..r…y…4…2…n…u…and so forth.
Some spots on the efficient frontier are more comfortable than others, no?
P.S. On the other hand, I’m sure Kaus still has another book or two or three within him, if he decides to move back in the other direction along that curve.
November 06, 2009
In the Applied Statistics Blog this week
1. Understanding the ‘Russian Mortality Paradox’ in Central Asia: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan
Short answer: alcohol and suicide.
2. Lumberjacks as a counterexample to the idea of a “risk premium”
They take lots of risks and don’t get paid well for it.
This is a visualization you won’t want to miss.
5. The political philosophy of the private eye
A genre that was rendered obsolete in 1961 (but nobody realizes it).
P.S. No, I won’t be pluggin my other blogs every week, just wanted to do it this once (and maybe every now and then if something politically relevant comes up).
October 06, 2009
Disclosure
The heady days and high times are over!
Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.
In the nearly two years that this blog has been in existence, I have received one free book, which I did mention in a blog post. That is the sum total of my loot. Henry Farrell, on the other hand, gets oodles of free books and has much to atone for, no doubt. Henry, don’t deny it! I’m not bailing you out of the klink when the FTC hauls you away in handcuffs.
But seriously, manufacturers of high-end computing and electronics equipment, I would love to disclose that I have received free products in exchange for my positive reviews. Please call.
August 20, 2009
New(ish) Afghanistan-Pakistan blog
While I was on holiday in Ireland, Foreign Policy started a new Afghanistan-Pakistan blog, with participation from political scientists among others. Lots of interesting material on the elections in Afghanistan today. Check it out here.
August 14, 2009
Do the Netroots Matter?
The real worry for the netroots is that Obama is undermining their particular blend of online politics. He has taken the parts of netroots politics that he likes (online organizing and fundraising), while dumping the parts that he doesn’t (a strongly confrontational politics and emphasis on bottom-up decision making). There isn’t much room for the netroots and vigorous online partisanship in Obama’s plans for the future of the Democratic Party.
That’s one interesting excerpt from Henry’s review of two books on the netroots. Much more is here.
NARA Blog
The National Archives has a blog.
That is all.
August 04, 2009
A Plain Blog About Politics
Jon Bernstein of Depauw University — last seen on this blog organizing roto baseball — is blogging at the aforementioned Plain Blog. Here’s one excerpt from a post on the proverbial health care bill:
First, on this bill. What’s likely going on, again, are two things: a desire to get a bill, and a desire to avoid controversial votes. The latter increases as we get closer to the 60th Senator. Senators seeking to avoid a controversial vote are looking to establish markers of reasonableness in lieu of Republican votes, which are essentially unavailable.
Violating norms or changing rules to allow a simple majority to work its will is the last thing that those Senators want, because the resulting bill will certainly be seen as controversial by Washingtonians, including the media. Instead, they are looking for the lowest realistic conditions of controversy available, which appear to include prolonged negotiations, unified Democratic support, and the support of at least the Maine Senators and possibly one other GOP vote. Bullying, then, will be a viable strategy if there are at least fifty Democratic Senators who are willing to support a bill under conditions of maximum controversy, but not fifty-eight (or maybe fifty-seven) Democrats willing to support a bill under the least foreseeable conditions of controversy. It is possible that we’ll wind up in that range, but I suspect that it is unlikely.
More broadly, Senators have always found it within their interests to preserve the power of individual members of the upper chamber. That’s the nature of the body, thanks to the relatively small number of Senators and the relatively diverse interests of statewide districts. On balance, I think that’s a worthwhile function of the Senate within the system. Moreover, while I think it’s fair to say that across-the-board, automatic filibusters on every issue are problematic, additional rights for the minority on major issues are well within the tradition of the Senate, and the health care bill fits comfortably within that. At any rate, good thing or no, it’s built into the structure of the Senate and therefore unlikely to change from within.
Find his blog here.
June 01, 2009
Who is or is not a "blogger"?
Henry reports that a colleague of his at George Washington University, Jeffrey Rosen, says he has sworn off blogging for good. But then Henry asks whether Rosen was really a blogger at all: in Henry’s words:
A 1,000 word commissioned essay for The New Republic, which goes through its usual editorial processes, is usually not considered a ‘blog entry.’ . . . I [Henry] will say that I’d prefer not to see the term blogpost become a residual category for ‘stuff I wrote which I wish I had thought through a bit more before I hit send.’
I just have two comments on this intra-GW conflict:
1. Does blogging now have higher prestige than magazine writing? It used to be that newspaper and magazine writers were insisting that blogging wasn’t journalism. Now we have unpaid bloggers saying that magazine writing isn’t really blogging!
2. Given the New Republic’s history, I wouldn’t say that “its usual editorial processes” counts for much. I’m guessing I have a more rigorous vetting process on my own blog (where the rule is that anyone with access can post any time) than the New Republic has for its thousand-word commissioned essays.
May 31, 2009
Jeffrey Rosen leaves the blogosphere
Our estimable GWU law school colleague, Jeffrey Rosen, tells NPR that he has foresworn blogging forever after getting into hot water with a piece about Sonia Sotomayor.
The article was used to bash the judge’s prospects even before her formal nomination. But its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he’s been burned by the episode, too — enough that he’s swearing off blogging for good. “It was a short Web piece,” Rosen says now, sounding a little shellshocked. “I basically thought of it as a blog entry.”
“Short” for Rosen, the legal affairs editor for the left-of-center New Republic magazine, was more than 1,000 words. “The Case Against Sotomayor” was posted on the Web site of The New Republic on May 4. He quoted unnamed former federal law clerks who had worked for Sotomayor and her colleagues. Some seemed quite high on her skills and her possible nomination. But he also cited the concerns of others about the intellectual rigor of her legal writing and her demeanor as a judge. …
Above all, Rosen says he’s drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won’t be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting “send.”
The interesting question though (for me as a political scientist who studies blogging) is whether or not Rosen ever actually took up blogging in the first place. As NPR’s writer hints, a 1,000 word commissioned essay for The New Republic, which goes through its usual editorial processes, is usually not considered a ‘blog entry.’ In our article on the politics of blogs Dan Drezner and I define a blog as:
a web page with minimal to no external editing, providing on-line commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources.
I’m sure you could argue with this definition, but for what it is worth, Rosen’s piece obviously doesn’t qualify under it. It provides online commentary, and has a few hyperlinks, but that’s it. It apparently had significant editing, is not an entry on a blog which is presented along with others in reverse chron that is periodically updated, and so on.
Without addressing the underlying controversy, I will say that I’d prefer not to see the term blogpost become a residual category for ‘stuff I wrote which I wish I had thought through a bit more before I hit send.’ Fair enough that online publishing encourages you to get stuff out quickly (sometimes too quickly) - but off-the-cuff judgments that are repented at leisure are neither an exclusive nor a necessary characteristic of blogging.
May 07, 2009
Does Time Spent on Facebook Hurt Your Grades?
You may remember the tizzy about this study, which claimed that Facebook use was associated with lower grades . Now, Eszter Hargittai, Josh Pasek, and eian moore have a new paper that finds no such relationship:
In contrast to recent sensational and unsubstantiated news reports that Facebook use lowers academic performance, results from three studies indicate that the two variables are likely unrelated. We found no relationship in a representative study of first–year undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a slight positive relationship in a nationally representative survey of youth. Further, we used national longitudinal data to assess changes in academic achievement from 2007 to 2008 in a nationally representative panel study of young people. Changes in academic achievement did not vary with Facebook use when demographic controls were considered. Facebook simply does not seem to have a generalizable impact on grades.
What is remarkable about this study is that it went from zero to a peer-reviewed publication in less than one month. This is a very interesting model for circumstances where a quick, but credible, academic response is useful and even necessary.
Here is Eszter’s initial post (dated April 16) noting the study and her skepticism. Here is the published article. And here is Eszter’s post describing how the article came together so quickly.
April 25, 2009
April 13, 2009
The difference between The Monkey Cage and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
March 05, 2009
Polit'bistro
via Arthur Goldhammer, a new blog (in French), on political science and France. I am aware of a couple of previous efforts to get something like this up and running, but this may be the one that succeeds. It is nicely put together, very well designed and with a good mixture of political science and current affairs commentary in the posts that have been published to date. This post on Nicholas Sarkozy and presidential style is a nice example, drawing on findings from both US and French political science. Perhaps at some point they might like to take a go at Roger Cohen’s Very Serious Discussion of the Frenchification of US Politics (if they do, I promise to translate the major points for a US audience.
March 02, 2009
A Bleg: What Are the Political Science Blogs?
I recently came across this diavlog between Ezra Klein and Dan Drezner. Klein comments on the dearth of political scientists in the blogosphere:
You would think that you would have just a massive influx of political scientists — high-profile ones at this point, good writers, who are really pushing the best sort of research and and attempting to inject it into political conversation.
That is after he notes how much “skew” there is between political science and economics in this realm. He and Drezner go on to discuss why that might be. I commend their exchange to you, although I’m not going to respond here.
My purpose is instead to list the blogs that feature academic political scientists. These will become part of our blogroll (which is long overdue). And it will give Klein and anyone else a sense of what the political science blogs are. (I’m not trying to prove a point. I agree with him that there are too few polisci blogs.)
Henry compiled the original list. I’ve added a few to it. I’m ignoring how often these blogs are updated. Some are updated only infrequently. At this stage, however, it seems better to build a complete list.
I need you to tell me which ones we’re missing. Again, we’re looking for blogs by academic political scientists — faculty or graduate students, domestic or foreign. A group blog that includes at least one political scientist counts.
Abstract Politics
Tony Arend
Kai Arzheimer
A Sibilant Intake of Breath
Hugh Bartling
Chris Blattman
Laurent Bouvet
Andreas Busch
CDSP Election 2008
Miguel Centellas
Jacob Christensen
Josef Colomer
Crooked Timber
Dan Drezner
The Duck of Minerva
Election ‘08 (Tom Holbrook)
Empirical Legal Studies
Enik Rising (Seth Masket)
Frontloading HQ (Josh Putnam)
Fruits and Votes (Matthew Shugart)
Andrew Gelman
Art Goldhammer
Nils Gustaffson
Matthew Hindman
The Interdependence Complex (Lauren Phillips)
Simon Jackman
Jim Johnson
Kids Prefer Cheese (Mike Munger)
King Politics (Marvin King)
Lawyers, Guns and Money
Jacob Levy
Marc Lynch
Nolan McCarty
Laura McKenna
Brendan Nyhan
Outside the Beltway
Patchwork Nation (Jim Gimpel)
Roger Payne
Political Arithmetik (Charles Franklin)
Pollster
Polysigh
The Quantitative Peace
Reflective Pundit (Brigitte Nacos)
Signifying Nothing (Chris Lawrence)
Social Science Statistics Blog
Steven Taylor
Uncommon Priors (Paul Gowder)
Voir Dire
January 22, 2009
Q&A with Michael Munger
Michael Munger is a political scientist at Duke and was the Libertarian candidate for governor in my home state of North Carolina in 2008. With Kevin Grier (a.k.a. Angus), he blogs as Mungowitz at Kids Prefer Cheese — a blog far funnier than ours. (Note to self: find a way to create a “pimpin’” category.)
I mentioned his campaign in an early post, but have been remiss about following up. See the election results here. Professor Munger graciously agreed to answer some questions via email. The exchange is below the jump. Click to read more about his leftist-for-North-Carolina politics, his cat-sitter theory of voting behavior, his colonoscopy, and his man-crush on Dan Drezner.
January 04, 2009
A New Blog and a Brag
Matthew Yglesias notes that some notable foreign policy bloggers are going to move over to the new online Foreign Policy magazine. That’s good news for one-stop shoppers, but it also presents an opportunity for The Monkey Cage to brag on our GW colleague Marc Lynch; to see why, click here for Yglesias’s write-up.
December 14, 2008
Nolan McCarty's Blog
Andy’s post below alerts me to Nolan McCarty’s new blog. Find it here. There is already a steady stream of interesting posts. Some tidbits:
… government intervention that tries to hold bad executives accountable has its own problems. It generates huge incentives for companies and executives to cultivate political favoritism to avoid punishment — pay-to-play writ large. (here)
For eight years now, congressional Democrats have been (rightfully) criticizing President Bush for abusing and expanding his exective powers. So how ironic is it that they now call upon him to violate the expressed will of Congress and use TARP funds (i.e. the first $700 billion) to bail out the automobile industry? (here)
…The 110th House was not only the most liberal since the New Deal, but the percentage of liberals has been increasing for some time. (here)
Recommended.
November 06, 2008
Too many blogs
What should I do? I post at Monkey Cage to be part of this fun community, I post at Red State, Blue State to continue to make people aware of the book and also because people have been going there for election analyses, and I post at Statistical Modeling for all sorts of things. But it’s killing me to be posting in three places.
September 21, 2008
New Princeton Election Blog
Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics has a new blog centered on the 2008 election. Its inaugural posts include these goodies:
- Larry Bartels shows in even more detail why Alan Brinkley is wrong about electoral politics. (My take is here and here.)
- Bartels cites a finding from this paper — one that that should demonstrate once and for all that Thomas Frank’s intuitions are no substitute for the facts: more than twice as many working-class people believe that Democratic politicians “would feel more comfortable having a beer with a truck driver, construction worker, or waitress” as believe that Republican politicians would feel this way.
I look forward to much more.
July 20, 2008
The Netroots and the 'Far Left'
John and Eric’s op-ed in the LAT got picked up in a frontpage diary at Kos by BarbinMD as an example of how the mainstream media disparage the netroots. The offending bit in BarbinMD’s eyes was the following.
To determine just how polarized blog readers are, we constructed a measure of political ideology by drawing on blog readers’ attitudes toward stem cell research, abortion, the Iraq war, the minimum wage and capital gains tax cuts. Using this measure, we then arrayed respondents from left to right. Here’s what we found.
Readers of liberal blogs were clustered at the far left ….
(The op-ed goes on to say that “readers of conservative blogs were bunched at the far right. There was little, if any, overlap between them on these issues.”)
BarbinMD responds
What does “the far left” mean? Here’s the attitudes of Americans as a whole on these issues:
and then goes on to list a series of opinion polls suggesting that a majority of Americans are against the Iraq war, favor stem cell research and so on. She concludes:
We reflect the majority opinion of this country on pretty much every issue, yet the media continues to pretend that we’re the far left, the lunatic fringe. They’re still unwilling to admit the obvious…we are the mainstream.
I didn’t write the op-ed, although I did co-author the research that the op-ed is based on. But BarbinMD’s interpretation of what the op-ed (and the research) is saying is mistaken. The reasons why are much easier to understand if you look at a graph of the data (unfortunately, the LAT, like most other newspapers, doesn’t usually print graphs of any complexity).
July 16, 2008
Election-Year Spike in Blog Readership
Major political blogs saw an average increase in page views of 48% during the first six months of 2008, compared to the last six months of 2007. Major liberal blogs saw the largest average increase with 63%, while conservative blogs experienced a 34% increase.
Bloggasm has more.
[Hat tip to Simon Owen.]
July 13, 2008
LA Times Op-Ed on Blog Readers
July 01, 2008
Self-Segregation and Polarization among Blog Readers
Henry, Eric Lawrence, and I have just finished a working paper that analyzes the first decent dataset of blog readers. The paper is here on SSRN or here, ungated.
The paper is motivated by normative questions about whether blogs facilitate deliberation and participation. We analyze this 2006 survey, in which about 15,000 respondents were asked whether they read blogs and which blogs they read. Some findings:
- 34% of respondents said they read a blog. 14% of respondents named a political blog.
- Political blog readers are, unsurprisingly, more educated, more partisan, and more interested in politics. These traits help give rise to the other findings described below.
- Almost all political blog readers read only blogs from one side of the political spectrum. Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.
- There is almost no overlap in the ideological orientation of readers of left- and right-wing blogs. Below is Figure 6 from the paper, mapping the ideologies of readers of some prominent blogs. The figure presents “violin plots.” The shape of the violins corresponds to where people are located on this measure of ideology. The white dots are the medians. Readers of the left-wing blogs are clustered on the lefthand side. Readers of right-wing blogs are on the opposite side. This is the polarization that the paper discusses.
- Blog readers are more likely to participate in politics than are people who don’t read blogs. Left-wing blog readers are more participatory than right-wing blog readers. We speculate that left-wing blogs have more fully embraced the tasks of social movements, thereby seeking to mobilize their readers.
These survey data do not allow us to make causal claims, but determining causation is is not the point of the paper. Instead, we use the observed patterns of association to draw implications for the normative value of political blogs. For most people, reading political blogs does not lead to deliberation — that is, to an exchange across partisan or ideological lines. People mainly inhabit “comforting cocoons of cognitive consonance.” But reading blogs may facilitate other normatively valuable behaviors, such as participation. Indeed, blogs like the Daily Kos explicitly want to stimulate participation more than deliberation (see Henry’s previous post).
This is a working paper, and suggestions are welcome.
(See also Henry’s post at Crooked Timber.)
April 21, 2008
New blog
Via Dan Nexon, I see that Daniel Little has a blog, Understanding Society with lots of interesting stuff. Little’s book Varieties of Social Explanation is my favourite introduction to the philosophy of social science, and his blog is very good too. It’s part of a larger project, which includes interviews with Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and other pol-sci luminaries. Recommended.
April 14, 2008
The AAPSS Has a Blog
The American Academy of Political and Social Science has a blog. It appears to be updated only occasionally, but there is some interesting stuff. See, for example, this piece by John Hibbing and Kevin Smith outlining the role of genetics in political behavior.
February 15, 2008
Think Tank Sociology
Moira Whelan speculates on Mike O’Hanlon and ‘think tank sociology.’
Think tanks in DC are traditionally known as refugee camps for the out-of-office team of foreign policy wonks. There’s an expected turn over when new administrations come on as each team goes about grabbing “the best and the brightest” to fill their ranks. O’Hanlon has by now gotten the message that he’s burned his bridges with his Democratic friends. Those that like him personally even agree that he’s radioactive right now thanks to his avid support of Bush’s war strategy. So what’s a wonk to do? … one option is pre-positioning yourself for the future. By getting out there and going after the leading Democrats—people that some of his closest colleagues are actively supporting—is he lining himself up to say that he was critiquing the next Administration before it was cool? That would be worth it, because as I’ve mentioned before, there are three forms of currency in the think tank world that make you a valuable player: bringing in money, getting press, and getting called to testify. This strategy could certainly pay off in those categories over the next few months.
February 06, 2008
Conservative and liberal bloggers
Eszter Hargittai and her colleagues have some interesting research,1 which I’ve blogged about before, on linking patterns and partisanship in the blogosphere. Among the other data they report is some that suggests that conservatives are more likely to respond substantively to liberals than vice-versa.
Straw-man arguments account for 43% of the 42 links from conservative blogs to liberals in our sample, and 54% of the 63 links from liberal blogs to conservatives in our group of entries that include cross-ideological linkages. …Posts that concretely address the content of a blog entry from an ideological opponent represent about a quarter (26%) of all conservative and about one fifth (21%) of all liberal posts with cross-ideological links. Substantive disagreement accounted for 12% of links from conservative to liberal blogs and 16% of links from liberals to conservatives, while substantive agreement accounted for 14% of links from conservatives to liberals and 5% of pointers from liberals to conservatives.
February 04, 2008
State-by-State Blogosphere Political Commentary Roundup -- Super Tuesday Edition
If you’re interested in a state-by-state roundup of what’s being said across the political spectrum in the blogosphere as Super Tuesday approaches, click here on your favorite state. Pretty cool.
[Hat tip to Dave Mastio at BlogNetNews.com ]
January 10, 2008
An Average Metablogpost
Unlike the residents of Garrison Keillor’s home town, all of whom are above average, we at “The Monkey Cage” turn out to be remarkably average. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Anyway, that’s the conclusion I draw from research by Laura McKenna and Antoinette Pole, as reported in their fact-filled article “What Do Bloggers Do: An Average Day on an Average Political Blog” (Public Choice, 134 (January 2008): 97-108).
The vast majority of political bloggers, McKenna and Pole report based on an online survey they recently completed, are white, well-educated, and male. We’re guilty as charged, except that David is Asian and John grew up in North Carolina and therefore was poorly educated. Most bloggers are young (between 26 and 41); admittedly, I’m a little older than that (yah, right). But on average, we’re about average.
What we do at “The Monkey Cage” also turns out to be about average. The core business of most political blogs consists of (1) providing readers with links to and comments about articles found elsewhere, including on other blogs, (2) discussing the issue positions or activities of political candidates, parties, and interest groups, and (3) speculating about upcoming votes. That’s pretty much what we do, too.
80% of political bloggers also try to serve as media watchdogs by keeping their readers informed about bias, misreporting, or omisisons in the media. We do a good deal of that, and it’s lots of fun.
One way in which we differ from most other political blogs is that the average political blogger tries to motivate his readers to become politically active in ways the blogger favors. We’re much more focused on political analysis than on political advocacy.
The key difference between us and the rest of the political blogosphere is that we (well, I) frequently post pictures of dogs and cats.
Naturally, we think the quality of our posts is way above average (but then we would, wouldn’t we?) and we’re delighted that many of our readers seem to think so, too.
All in all, I must admit that this is a pretty mundane post — but what would you expect when an average blogger on an average blog writes about average bloggers and their average posts on average blogs?
December 06, 2007
Head of the CBO is Blogging
Peter Orszag, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, has started a blog. However, the comments are off.
November 20, 2007
Comments Policy
Three comments about our comments policy are in order. First, we’ll try to read all comments, but we won’t always want to get involved in the back-and-forth of debate within the comments section. This is solely because we have competing pressures on our time, and in no way reflects on the quality of the comments, the pressing nature of questions raised about our posts, etc.
Second, the comments section is currently open to everyone. Our moderation will have a light touch. Again, we don’t have enough time to engage in micro-management, even if we were of a mind to. However, we will step in if we feel that comments are off-topic, unnecessarily offensive, or involve too high a degree of personal vitriol. Please be civil.
Third, we strongly prefer that all comments have the author’s actual first and last names attached. We believe that this will significantly enhance any exchange of knowledge or ideas. We acknowledge that there may be strategic reasons for anonymity in certain circumstances, but we urge authors to identify themselves
Why This Blog?
Why are we writing this blog? Here is a probably-not-exhaustive set of reasons, in rough order of importance.
1) To publicize political science research. Political scientists have been relatively slow in progressing to the blogosphere. Within our general area of the academy, the prevalence of economists is perhaps most noteworthy—among others, Gary Becker, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Dani Rodrik, and Mark Thoma. The folks at Crooked Timber, including our colleague Henry Farrell, span various disciplines, including philosophy, economics, political science, and sociology. (Henry is also owed a significant debt of gratitude for his advice and guidance to us as we began to conceive and then establish this blog.)
Among political scientists in particular, there are the aforementioned Henry Farrell, Daniel Drezner, Jim Johnson, Simon Jackman, Marc Lynch, and the folks at Polysigh. Several blogs oriented around statistical methods (including Andrew Gelman’s and the Social Science Statistics Blog) and law (Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog and the Empirical Legal Studies Blog) also deal with topics within political science.
Of course, there are others we have not listed, but even if all of these blogs were itemized, political scientists would be under-represented. This is particularly true in our areas of study, which focus on public opinion and mass political behavior, both in American politics and in comparative perspective.
The consequence, as Henry Farrell has written in response to a comment by Ezra Klein, is that political science research gets short shrift from the media, the policy community, and the types of people who read academically-oriented blogs. We want to extend what Henry does at his Political Science Weblog, which is post abstracts to interesting papers. Our model is Marginal Revolution, which is perhaps the most important inspiration for this blog. We will post abstracts and links to articles, papers, and books, along with comments that summarize our own reactions and/or discuss the work's importance. We will occasionally highlight our own work, but will try to steer clear of wanton self-promotion. We will occasionally invite guest bloggers for temporary residence. Readers are always welcome to suggest new work that we might highlight. Ultimately, we hope that this blog will gain political science research greater attention and currency.
2) To provide informed commentary on political events and issues. Don’t read anything too self-important in the word “informed.” All we mean by that is that we will draw upon extant research, as well as our own data analyses, to speak to contemporary politics. Here, we are inspired in part by Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin’s work at Pollster.com. The main difference is that whereas Pollster.com serves mainly to collect and aggregate polls of Americans and to comment on issues within the domain of polling, we intend a broader scope, including topics unrelated to polling or elections or American politics. We will also try to be more directly engaged in testing and perhaps contesting propositions from journalists or commentators, much as Morris Fiorina has done in his book-length take-down of the red-blue state notion and the “culture war.” Ultimately, we want contemporary discourse about politics centered as much as possible on the best kinds of evidence.
3) To think aloud. Seth Roberts, another source of inspiration for this blog, has written “Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.” Thus, we envision short posts about items we have read or less than fully baked ideas that have occurred to us. Perhaps these posts will ultimately illuminate only our own intellectual shortcomings. But even if no one leaves comments or provides feedback or explains why we’re wrong, it will be useful just to write.
4) To indulge our non-academic interests. We don’t presume that everyone will be fascinated by our idiosyncratic pursuits. But we want the blog to have a "personality" that extends beyond political science.
Of course, as the blog develops, its purposes may change somewhat in response to both our own interests and those of our readers. At any point in time, we certainly welcome feedback that anyone may offer. Thanks for reading, and please come back soon.