Henry Farrell

Thomas Ricks posts a disturbing – if not exactly surprising – response to the Air Force’s decision to shut down Strategic Studies Quarterly. On its fortieth anniversary, the USAF unceremoniously cancelled the Air University Review and its content was redirected toward the tactically- and operationally-oriented Airpower Journal (today Air and Space Power Journal). The faculty […]

Alex Downes, who has just joined the department at GWU, has a great piece on this topic, with this title, in the new Boston Review. Key paragraph: Is the bloody aftermath of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq the exception or the rule? Does regime change work? The short answer is: rarely. The reasons for […]

If only entirely inadvertently … Scott Heiferman recounts how Putnam inspired him to create Meetup.com. I followed a link from a blog somewhere to something about Bowling Alone. It was October 1st that I ordered Bowling Alone on Amazon and was really intrigued. Putnam basically sold me on the idea that local community is important. […]

As the eurozone crisis heats up yet again, Kate McNamara has a paper which makes an intriguing historical comparison – to the creation of a common currency in the 19th century US. The comparison suggests that the EU lacks one of the two precipitating factors that helped push through a common currency in the US […]

Yes, according to a new paper by M. D. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, M. Francisco, B. Goncalves, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer (computer scientists are apparently big on the idea of not letting the world know what their first names are). But there still is some interesting interaction between Twitter users from different political perspectives. The […]

Alyssa Rosenberg claims that the themes of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire map well onto modern-day international relations. It turns out that, apart from the dragons and giant magical wolves, the Westeros of Martin’s novels is a familiar place: The challenges of international relations are pretty much the same whether you’re […]

Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the relevant social science suggests that US policy makers should not try to reverse the decline of unions. Underlying this dispute … is a fundamental difference in perspective about the decline of unions. Liberals fear it will lead to the immiseration of the middle class. Conservatives tend to see it as […]

I’ve been meaning to respond to this Matt Yglesias post for a while, since it rests on a supposition that isn’t quite true. Matt: For the past thirty years a broadly neoliberal tide has swept all over the world, but France has gone much less neoliberal than other developed countries. As a result, it’s seems […]

Via a source in the UT system, this Austin American Statesman post on claims by a think tank linked to Texas governor Rick Perry that it is possible to measure faculty productivity. In the 17-page paper, Vedder analyzed faculty productivity based strictly on the number of student credit hours each professor taught. He calculated the […]

Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen (PDF) have a piece on the relationship between inequality and distribution in the new American Political Science Review. There is a lot of debate about whether the level of economic inequality in society leads to greater or lesser distribution – what Lupu and Pontussen suggest is that the structure of […]