Political Science Fortune Cookies

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Whenever people open fortune cookies, they always expect to find a small piece of paper inside that has words of wisdom written on it. Last week, I opened a fortune cookie and much to my surprise, there were words of political wisdom written on the slip: "The will of the people is the best law." … Read more

The Poor Tyrant!

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Why
do dictators win elections?  The answer to this is relatively
straightforward–they hold fixed elections.  Everyone knows they’re fixed
and everyone knows who will win before the balloting even begins.  If the actual
numerical results aren’t fixed, then the rules regarding who may contest the
elections and who may vote in them certainly are.  Dictatorial regimes
hold elections to demonstrate to the world that, not only are they giving their
citizens a choice in their leadership, but also that their citizens
resoundingly love them and wouldn’t prefer a more representative, and perhaps
less repressive, government.

If all of that is true, then what went wrong in
Zimbabwe?  Discussion comes after the jump.

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A cup of coffee, a blow up doll, and some functionally unpleasant commuters

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Die hard rational choice social scientists are often puzzled when they see people making less than optimal decisions. For example, it is hard to explain why people choose to pay the cost of punishment and make themselves worse off just so that they can punish someone who acted unfair or against the rules. I came across an example of this in yesterday’s Washington Post when a reporter published a story about a little known short cut near the Dulles Airport. According to the reporter, drivers normally sit in traffic, moving slowly, on a toll road as they drove passed the airport, but they could avoid the traffic and save time and money by taking the public access road through the airport. The only problem is that the public access road is only meant for airport traffic. It is against the “rules” to drive on it unless you are utilizing the airport’s services or are have a passenger with you during rush hour. People have found creative ways around these rules, like buying a cup of coffee from the sole gas station in the airport or driving with a blow up doll in the passenger seat. However, these methods are not exactly seen as legitimate ways to get around the rules. The "right" thing to do is to stay on the toll road and not cut through unfairly through the airport road.

More after the jump….

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The Quantitative Peace has been “Freaked”

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Since it is possible for a low-traffic website to be Slashdotted, and Farked (that is, sent a  large amount of traffic from a highly visited site), I think the term "freaked" or "Freak(onomics)ed out" may be apt here: Graph generated and borrowed from statcounter.com. The unique visitors are still climbing! The spike in traffic resulted … Read more

Something to keep an eye out for: Google Data

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Wired reports that Google plans to release, soon, a framework for hosting, storing, and distributing large or frequently used data.  The Project, Palimpsest, will pay the fees to both ship the data (by sending users a 3TB hard drive to download the data) and for hosting.  This, if applicable for political science scholars, not only … Read more

When Form can Overwhelm Content

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I am not a visually oriented person or, more appropriately, I am less than stellar at design.  This may not be a surprise to anyone that has seen my attempts to assemble a wardrobe, but this is also true in the sense of organizing information – whether it is in a paper, on a poster, … Read more

Bridging the Gap between the Hard Sciences and the Humanities

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NY Times Article References New BU Program Two professors at Binghamton University, Dr. David Sloan Wilson of the Biology department and Dr. Leslie Heywood of the English department, are currently developing a joint Science and Humanitities program called the "New Humanities Initiative". This program will add a rubric to BU courses which expose students to … Read more

The APSA and AAAS Take Action to Free Jailed Political Scientist

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The American Political Science Association is taking official action on behalf of Dr. Matrouk al-Faleh, a political scientist detained by the Saudi government.  You may have heard about this, especially if you’re a member of the Human Rights section of APSA; if you haven’t, here are some basic facts about Faleh and the consequences of … Read more

Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers

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I posted previously that Freakonomics was hosting a Prisoner’s Dilemma contest.  About a week ago they selected the top five answers and had a quick voting contest (comment democracy with 48 hours to decide the winner).  Since I am both currently attending one of the EITM summer programs and exercising my current mathematical knowledge by attempting to run a maximum likelihood estimation of a generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma model with a normally distributed cost function to the players for cooperation; it seemed like a good time to return to the post and evaluate the answers provided.

Adding a pre-game to the Prisoner’s Dilemma ought not to change the strategy of either player.  In theory, if you are asking your potential opponent/partner a question, you want to select someone who is going to play sub-optimally by either their own ignorance or your ability to convey to them that you are willing to cooperate (but will not anyways).  A rational interviewee will see this, and will either defect no matter what to dissuade you from picking them or attempt to coax the main player into cooperation only willing to defect later.  When evaluating any question you are asking another person a question in a non-cooperative framework, you must ascribe the same level of rationality that they will have in playing the game.  That is, if you believe people to remain rational actors, then talk prior to the game can remain cheap as a single question may not return an honest answer.

After the jump I discuss the five questions and the usefulness of each:

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