Erik Voeten

This image from Keith Poole’s Voteview blog displays how members of the House voted on the debt ceiling deal. Each member of the House is displayed by a point in a two-dimensional space that reflects how they voted on all bills prior to last night’s vote. The horizontal axis reflects the liberal-conservative scale. So, legislators […]

In a remarkable and unexpected ruling, a Dutch Court held yesterday that the Dutch state is responsible for the deaths of three persons in the Srebrenica genocide. This is the first time that a state is held responsible for the conduct of its troops during peacekeeping missions that operated under UN authority. As Michael Bochenek, […]

Since we all love rankings, here are the new world rankings of universities in Politics and International studies, released by QS. Below is the top ten. Clearly, the only worthwhile universities are in the anglo-saxon world. NYU is at 20 and Georgetown at 23. GW is in the 50-100 range. If your university does better […]

Last month, the New York Times and other news outlets reported that the Obama administration is developing “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that can be set-up from a suitcase. The stated goal is to prevent efforts by repressive governments to silence dissidents. Yet, a new working paper by Jakob Shapiro and Nils Weidmann suggests […]

I am spending the summer in the Netherlands and I have been struck by just how much Dutch politics has changed. It is hard to resist the temptation to think that the American tea party would be quite enamored of the current Dutch government. The cabinet appears to make its mark by launching initiatives that […]

Carl Zimmer’s article in the Sunday New York Times on the struggles scientists have to correct erroneous published results is interesting throughout but this part struck me particularly: In March, for instance, Daryl Bem, a psychologist at Cornell University, shocked his colleagues by publishing a paper in a leading scientific journal, The Journal of Personality […]

We are very pleased to have a guest post from Jacob N. Shapiro, an assistant Professor at Princeton University, on the contributions quantitative social science and the humanities can make to important questions of (national) security. Jake is one of the leading young scholars in international security. We have blogged before on his research on […]

We are pleased to have another guest post from Marc Morjé Howard on the differences and similarities between the 2011 revolutions in the Middle East and the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. See here, here, and here for some of our earlier posts on this. *** In his speech on Saturday in Warsaw, President Obama […]

I am delighted to welcome my friend and colleague Marc M. Howard with a guest post on Monday’s Supreme Court ruling. Marc is currently working on a new book on American punitiveness in comparative perspective. ***** In response to Monday’s momentous Supreme Court ruling—which represents a rare victory for prisoners’ rights advocates—the “law and order” […]

Apropos of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, Yale’s Keith Chen and Jesse Shapiro find (gated , ungated version) that harsh prison conditions have no deterrent effect. Au contraire: We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher […]