Biology and Politics

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A few years ago I wrote a blog post about a study that found a link between certain genes and interest in politics. Two new studies have come out since that go even further, and find a link between brain region size and genes, and political preference. I discuss them below. Brain Region Size and Ideology A … Read more

2000 – 2010: End of Year/End of Decade Lists: Top Five Politically Significant Days of the Decade?

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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

CRACK

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I found this link via Andrew Gelman's blog the other day: CRACK Mapmaking software for Mac I haven't had much of a chance to play with it, but it looks like it could be useful.  I've had a few instances in class this semester where I've wanted to make some maps of the US to … Read more

Gift List for Political Scientists, 2010

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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

A few technical updates

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I've changed a few features on the blog to make access and moderation easier. 1) The RSS feed now features the entirety of posts as opposed to just the first sentence.  I have been told this will increase the amount of material that is actually read, but will decrease what we know about our readers.  … Read more

Redistricting and Representation 101

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The 2010 decennial census is nearly complete and within the next couple of months US states will once again be redefining congressional district lines. For practical reasons, redistricting is a necessary process in the US political system. US House of Representative districts must be relatively equal in population size and from time to time district … Read more

Wikileaks’ Latest and Greatest

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Yesterday, Wikileaks released a bunch of new information on the war in Iraq.  While I haven't had a chance to dig through much of it yet, I'm curious to see which narrative is going to win out in the short term.  Rather, of the several dimensions of the war effort that these reports cover, which one will the press focus on?  Which one will come to be most closely associated with this leak in 20 years?  More speculation after the jump.

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