Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
Julie VanDusky-Allen For the last 15 years, more Americans have opted to take advantage of early voting opportunities (either through early in-person voting or mail ballots). By 2008, early voting compromised one third of the vote. Early voting seemed to help Democrats more than Republicans in 2008, as Democrats were more likely to vote early than Republicans. … Read more
The Badminton World Federation disqualified four female badminton teams today from the London Olympics for unsportsmanlike behavior. These teams purposefully tried to lose their first match in a round robin event in order to be paired against easier teams in subsequent rounds (video recap here). These teams were obviously cheating as purposely losing in this … Read more
I had the opportunity to serve as a juror this week for a case in Ontario County, NY. This was the first time I served on a jury. I thought it would be funny to do something like this to get out of it, but now I am really glad I served. It was a … Read more
In the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) today, the court upheld the individual mandate provision today viewing it as a tax. The ruling stated that while Congress could not require people to buy insurance, Congress could tax people who did not buy insurance. From another perspective, instead of looking at the individual … Read more
Stevens’ criticisms of political science in her NY Times OP-Ed were not criticisms of political science per se; rather, they were criticisms of the scientific process in general. It is a frustrating process. It would be nice if we could identify all the causes of a particular outcome after doing a limited amount of research. … Read more
Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that jails could strip search any new inmate regardless of their suspected crime. The majority opinion stated that it does not matter if an inmate is arrested for a minor offense such as an outstanding traffic violation, they can be subject to a strip search. Of course the decision was … Read more
The President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, has been trying to crack down on drug cartels in Mexico for the last five years. The drug cartels have fiercely fought back and about 40,000 people have been killed. Because of all these deaths, and because of the ever increasing presence of cartels throughout the country, many people … Read more
A few weeks ago, it appeared as though certain House Republicans would have rather seen the country go into default rather than raise taxes. Now it seems that the GOP is willing to let the temporary payroll tax cuts expire as planned. This is the same GOP who fought hard to make sure the Bush … Read more
Several recent studies by three University of California psychologists, Michael Kraus, Paul Piff, and Dacher Keltner, suggest that individuals with lower class incomes are more empathetic and more altruistic than individuals with higher class incomes. They argue that since lower income individuals have to rely more on others to survive, they learn pro-social behaviors and learn to emphasize with … Read more
On last night’s episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert interviewed Amy Farrell, Professor of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College, and author of the newly published book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. Here is an excerpt from the summary of the book on Amazon: “Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness … Read more