John Sides

Apropos of my Q&A on early polling, Chris Wlezien sends the following, which is forthcoming in a book with Robert Erikson.  They take all of the polls from up to 300 days before the presidential elections from 1956-2008 (except for 1968, which did not have polling that far back).  They then forecast each presidential election […]

Greg Sargent has had two posts about what he calls the “Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop.” In brief: The relentless bipartisan focus on the deficit convinces voters to be worried about it, which in turn leads lawmakers to spend still more time talking about it and less time talking about the economy. In his most recent […]

When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average. Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In […]

In this earlier post, I posted the comment of a Monkey Cage reader, who suggested that political science has not devoted enough attention to the executive function of the president, and especially presidential appointees: At least as importantly, NOMINATE as an assessment of a President continues the common fixation on the President as a legislative […]

Presidential rankings are usually conducted by professors. Do they therefore reflect a liberal bias? Presidential ranking polls communicate far more than an ordered list of names; they communicate the leadership qualities our nation values. Given this, the results of presidential ranking polls have been a source of contention. One recurrent concern is that the academic […]

It’s not just that the candidates are more or less attractive to the American people. It looks like they also pursue different strategies. We examine county-level campaign appearances by the Republican and Democratic tickets during the 2008 general election. Our analysis reveals that the McCain-Palin ticket campaigned in a way that was quite different from […]

There has been a recent exchange of views about how liberal Barack Obama really is—involving Ezra Klein and Nate Silver, among others. This gets at the challenge of how we measure political ideology and whether we can make easy comparisons between Obama, previous presidents, other politicians then and now, and so on. I asked Michael […]

Just in case you were wondering about the implications of beheading, or rather, removing the leadership from an organization. …this project answers three primary questions: (1) Under what conditions does leadership decapitation result in the dissolution of a terrorist organization?; (2) Does leadership decapitation increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond the baseline rate of […]

The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various […]