Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
By now I'm sure most people have come across Amy Chua's recent Wall Street Journal article. After reading David Brooks' response to Chau's article, I've begun to think of some of some of the international relations implications of Chua's Chinese parenting style. Specifically, I'm curious to see what her revelations imply for China's ascendency in … Read more
I love lists and I hope you do too. Several lists have occurred to me recently, and I was going to ignore my itch to make them because there are probably lots of good end-of-year lists floating around now. But do any of them take a quantitative approach to list-making? I’m going to try the … Read more
Microbiology posts its best reviewer comments every year; the 2010 edition is out (I beleive the article is ungated). A few highlights include: The writing and data presentation are so bad that I had to leave work and go home early and then spend time to wonder what life is about. It is sad to … Read more
Mind Your Decisions has done an annual gift list for economists for the last few years, and Presh just put together his 2010 list. Using his list as inspiration, I have compiled my own list of possible gifts for Political Scientists. Given my proclivity for strategic leisure, I believe I can construct this with some … Read more
Just a quick post on a couple of things:
Michael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy with a specific focus on security cooperation and military deployments.
So it's clearly been a while since my last post. I'd like to remedy this by offering some quick reflections on the past couple of months. First, teaching the first "draft" of a course, so to speak, is hard. I've talked to a lot of people about this recently and have gotten a lot of … Read more
Are people more likely to trust people who are "like" them? A recent article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that this is the case. The article suggests that people are less likely to trust people with heavy accents. In the study, Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar set up an experiment where they had 55 English speaking Americans judge the truthfulness of several trivia … Read more
My colleagues and I have recently discovered that there is a thief in Binghamton who travels around poorly lit neighborhoods at night, breaks into cars, and steals coins. What is puzzling about this situation is that this individual does not try to steal more expensive things, such as the cars themselves or expensive car parts like GPS units. … Read more
Scientists at the Library of Congress have recently discovered that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson referred to the residents of the colonies as subjects and not as citizens. However, based on the evidence, it appears that Jefferson almost immediately decided against using the word and wanted to hide any … Read more