John Sides

Michael Tomasky’s piece at the Daily Beast about presidential elections deserves a few responses.  He begins with some unnecessary swipes at political science: Politics is sometimes a science and other times an art. So here we sit, with the election exactly a year away, and the conventional wisdom in the political press is largely driven […]

In response to my post on Drew Westen’s latest, a few commenters took issue with a secondary point. (My primary point, that Westen mischaracterizes the partisanship of the mass public, attracted less dissent.) My secondary point was that, despite this stereotype that Democratic politicians are less disciplined than Republicans—more fractious, harder to coordinate, etc.—Democrats and […]

I am fascinated by this result from the latest HuffPo-Patch poll of Republican party elites in the early primary and caucus states: Nearly three-fourths, 74 percent, of these party insiders believe that “can beat Obama” describes Cain “very well” or “somewhat well.”  That’s more confidence than I would expect.  I would be interested to know […]

This is a guest post from sociologists Neal Caren and Sarah Gaby of UNC-Chapel Hill.  The paper they are discussing is available here. While Occupy Wall Street has received most of its attention for its sustained public displays of numbers and commitment in New York City and many other locations, the movement also has an […]

From The Atlantic’s comments section.  Courtesy of Chris Albon. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

“Broken Politics, Mixed-Up Media” was the title of a panel discussion scheduled last night at George Washington University.  The participants were former Senator Robert Bennett, former Congressman Harold Ford, CNN correspondent Dana Bash, and, uh, me.  Frank Sesno will moderate.  This was the tagline for the panel: The debt crisis. The rise of the Tea […]

The Founding Fathers never meant for Washington, D.C. to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact, they were very much afraid of that because they had just had this experience with this far away government that had centralized thought process and planning and what have you. And it was actually the […]

A new Brennan Center study—which is getting front-page news coverage—attempts to count the number of citizens that could be adversely affected by new laws requiring voters to have photo identification.  But do these laws actually reduce voter turnout? In my 2007 post on this subject, I noted two studies.  One determined that immigrants and ethnic […]

It’s because he prefers to toss off some musings instead of just reading some political science.  Here again is my post from three weeks ago.  And here is the paper it discussed, by Beth Miller, Jennifer Lundgren, Diane Filion, and Lauren Thompson.  In their study, obese male candidates were actually evaluated MORE POSITIVELY than non-obese […]

The economy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s closely connected to the nation’s politics. Ezra Klein: During the summer’s debt-ceiling debate, the consumer confidence numbers gathered by Reuters and the University of Michigan plummeted. In an effort to figure out what was going on, Goldman Sachs tried to plug the data into a model that […]