Erik Voeten

There is a pretty strong consensus that the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the Senate rejected on Tuesday, would have imposed no meaningful sovereignty costs on the United States.  So when the New York Times wanted to line up a debate on the merit of ratification, it had to look long and […]

Dan Drezner argues that yesterday’s Senate vote to reject the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities reflects a victory of a sovereigntist lobby that seeks to protect the U.S. from …… well, something . It is indeed a bit odd to describe the Convention as “just another UN power grab” when it was inspired […]

It looks like the United Nations General Assembly is set to vote today on granting the Palestinian Authority the status of a “non-member observer state.” As the title suggest, this would not grant the Palestinians UN membership but it would be a symbolic endorsement of their status as a “state.” I did a couple of posts last […]

Washington State and Colorado legalized the recreational use of marijuana during Tuesday’s election. There are still many legal issues to be sorted out but it pays to ponder what will happen if legalization indeed takes effect. Alex Tabarrok may be right that this will simply become a new norm and that “In the future people will […]

President Obama is currently leading by as much as 4-5 points in the polls if attention were restricted to registered voters. Yet, polls based on the subsample of “likely” voters show a different story, with Mitt Romney equal or slightly in the lead. How sure are we that these “likely voter” corrections adequately assess who […]

Americans care a lot less about foreign policy than the economy. So will the foreign policy debate matter at all? There are two reasons to believe that it will be just as important as any other debate. The first is that issues play a limited role in voting decisions. Debates have mattered mostly for what they […]

So the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize today for “ for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” It is easy to make fun of this given the current crisis but there is certainly an argument to be made that the long term contributions of […]

Data from Google Insights. States with smaller populations are less likely to have sufficient search volume given that Google calculates data based on samples (this includes some of the light blue states). Yet, the red-state blue-state divide seems to hold pretty well. The top ten states in terms of search volume were: New Hampshire, Maine, […]

For those of you who didn’t hear it on NPR, Nature just published a fascinating study by Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler on an experiment to increase voter turnout via Facebook messages. Some, of 61 million Facebook users were randomly assigned to receive a message on their Facebook […]

Dan Drezner argues that foreign policy matters in two ways in this election: Barack Obama is viewed as more competent than Mitt Romney on foreign policy; Democrats and Republicans have pretty similar foreign policy views and where they differ, independents are closer to Obama’s than to Romney’s stated foreign policy positions ; I think Dan is […]