Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
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
Much has been made lately of the idea that Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as VP signals that he is doubling down on the economy for the election. Ryan is clearly known more for his activities on the House Budget Committee than anything else, and that’s fine, but just because it’s a major signal … 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
A spoiler warning before I get to the heart of the discussion: This blog entry is being posted the Monday after the release of The Dark Knight Rises. The blog post deals with material presented in the film, plot elements, as well as some dialogue, so consider this a warning. While I am not going to … Read more
Let me preface this by saying that I started writing this post a little while ago, so some of the content is a bit dated at this point. That said, over at the Duck, Steve Saideman has a post up that continues the ongoing discussion on political science, its utility, and its relationship with the … Read more
I've been working recently on quite a few projects that deal with human rights and NGOs, and today's BBC podcast has quite a bit of material that is relevant to these topics. First, there's a story regarding a new law that is being debated in Russia that would require NGOs receiving funding from external sources … 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
Phil Arena has a very cool post up wherein he explores a potential alternative to the ubiquitous CINC score for measuring military capabilities. This strikes me as something that is long overdue. And there are a couple of things that I like about the measure just from taking a quick glance at it. First, given … Read more