Henry Farrell

Conor Friedersdorf (if Lot were to look for One Honest Conservative Commentator to save the tribe from divine wrath, he’d likely have to lump for Friedersdorf), says no. Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. … Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis […]

Attention Conservation Notice: A few hundred words in the key of Someone Not On the Internet Is Wrong Writing about public intellectuals a couple of weeks ago reminded me of how annoyed I was by a comment Tony Judt makes in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Judt contemplates the sales figures of even the most successful […]

The New York Times had an article yesterday on the foreign consequences of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. A law intended to prohibit the payment of bribes to foreign officials by United States businesses has produced more than $3 billion in settlements. But a list of the top companies making these settlements is notable […]

I was on holiday in Ireland over the last couple of weeks without regular Internet access; one of the things I missed was the Niall Ferguson debate. I liked how these posts from Dan Drezner and Justin Fox identified Ferguson’s behavior as symptomatic of a broader structural change. Drezner: Credentialed thinkers like Zakaria and Ferguson, […]

Via a Tweet from Ned Resnikoff, this letter from Karl Marx, congratulating President Lincoln on his re-election. We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From […]

K. Amber Curtis, Joe Jupille and David Leblang have a paper on Iceland’s “Icesave” referendums, “the only occasions in history on which ‘the people’ were asked to vote directly on sovereign debt resettlement terms.” On the basis of a survey conducted immediately after the second referendum, they find that voting was in part driven by […]

Via Matthew Yglesias on Twitter, this insight from the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative economics blog looks to plausibly have relevance for political scientists. Milton Friedman’s thermostat is an idea that has very broad application, and has nothing in particular to do with Monetarism or even macroeconomics. Or even economics. … Everybody knows that if you press […]

A short note on something I’d like to have time to write about at further length someday. There’s a common perception among US lefties that Northern European states like Germany are (or at least were, until recently) the land of milk, honey, and organized capitalism. But actual European social democrats have more complicated feelings about […]

Over the last decade, international security scholars have created a cottage industry investigating the role of “audience costs” in coercion, thanks in large part to a theoretical argument first put forward by Monkey Cage blogger, James Fearon. One implication is that democratic leaders will be more likely to have their threats believed than non-democratic leaders, […]

I am a member of a multi-author team which has been doing USIP sponsored work on new technology and the Arab Spring. The USIP has just published a report based on our findings, which suggest that Twitter was rather more important as a way of conveying news out of the region and towards an international […]