Erik Voeten

A forthcoming article (non-gated version here) by Lars Berger shows that contributions from defense interests correlate strongly and significantly with the willingness of Congressmen to defeat attempts to reduce military aid to Egypt during the Mubarak era. Here is the abstract: In February 2011, the dramatic ouster of Hosni Mubarak threw into the spotlight the […]

Daniel Drezner has an interesting post arguing that tales of U.S. decline and China’s ascent are wildly exaggerated. The post contains lots of interesting analysis but this quote from Michael Beckley’s new article (see here for Andrew Sullivan’s analysis) in International Security had me scratching my head: The widespread misperception that China is catching up […]

One of the driving forces behind the creation of Google Insights was the observation that Google searches can predict flu epidemics more quickly than other types of observations. Shauna Reilly, Sean Richey, and Benjamin Taylor have a forthcoming article (nongated), which suggests that political behavior too can be predicted from search terms. In particular they […]

While most studies find little evidence that race mattered a great deal in the 2008 election, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz finds in a working paper that racial animus cost Obama a very large proportion of the national vote. The key difference between his study and others is that he constructs measures of racial attitudes based on google […]

There may be all kinds of things wrong with law schools but they sure have figured out how to run an applications process. You submit one letter for a student, answer a few questions about how to rank the student compared to others, and that’s it! By contrast, each policy school and PhD program has […]

Why have nuclear weapons not been used after they seemingly effectively led to the capitulation of Japan in World War II? One important explanation advanced by Nina Tannenwald and others is that first usage has become stigmatized as unacceptable. Indeed, the argument goes, the normative prohibition against first use has become so strong that it […]

My call last week for bizarre political ads from across the globe received a fair number of peculiar and sometimes downright frightening examples. Especially popular were singing politicians, like these German Social-Democrats and Iceland’s Best Party, which actually won the mayoral election for which the ad was made although, according to commenter Sona, they failed […]

Hermain Cain’s somewhat unusual ads have inspired some to come up with all-time lists of bizarre political ads from the U.S.. I wonder if we could use the collective wisdom of readers to find some of the most bizarre political ads across the globe. I accept nominations in the comments. I nominate this ad from […]

How do electorates respond to financial crises? This question seems pertinent as analysts are scrambling to make sense of the Occupy Wall Street movement and ponder how the crisis is going to affect the next election. According to a working paper by Lawrence Broz, electorates generally shift to the left and so do governments. Broz […]

A New York Times op-ed yesterday by Craig Pollack and political scientist Julia Lynch discusses new research demonstrating the health effects of foreclosures: A growing body of research shows that foreclosure itself harms the health of families and communities. In our 2008 survey of 250 people undergoing foreclosure in the Philadelphia area, 32 percent reported […]