John Sides

Maybe you haven’t heard of the James Webb Space Telescope.  NASA says that it “will address several key questions to help us unravel the story of the formation of structures in the Universe such as: When and how did reionization occur? What sources caused reionization? What are the first galaxies?”  NASA also says that the […]

As part of a look at how much campaigning actually mattered in this most recent presidential election I’ll report on some of what Lynn Vavreck and I have found in our work for The Gamble. What we did Lynn and I were able to do something that, to our knowledge, has not been done before: […]

As part of a mini-symposium on campaign effects in 2012, I welcome this guest post by Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler.  The first post in this sequence, by Michael Franz, is here. ***** Does the 2012 Obama campaign deserve the hype?  Many journalists have praised the technological and strategic advantage of Obama over Romney’s campaign. […]

It’s really extraordinarily pleasing to watch a terribly misinformed view of presidential power finally get its comeuppance.  Various political scientists—Brendan Nyhan, Jon Bernstein, Andy R., me, and others—have been pushing back at this view for years.  And now, as Andy pointed out, beware the pundit who ventures forth with calls for the president to exert […]

The popular reception to political scientist Michael Chwe’s book Jane Austen, Game Theorist has been striking.  Here is the New York Times story and Chelsea Clinton’s gushy tweet.  A video Michael made about the book is here.  Michael wrote to me with his own reaction to the book’s reception. What surprises me most about the […]

Contemporary political science suffers from too much policy relevance, not too little.  Politicians simply do not like the policies that scholarly research supports, prefer policies (often put forward by charlatans) that better suit their interests, and seek to suppress or ignore evidence-based research that contradicts their own, or their “base” voters’, ideologies.  When these same […]

Does contacting one’s legislator influence public policy? We answer this question with a field experiment in which Michigan state legislators are randomly assigned to be contacted by their constituents about a specific bill. The field experimental design allows us to produce internally and externally valid estimates of the influence of constituent contacts on legislative voting. […]

My Wonkblog post today begins with a tweet from Chuck Woolery and segues into a forthcoming article by Kimberly Gross and me about American stereotypes of Muslims and their consequences for policy attitudes.  Here is a graph showing how white non-Muslim respondents stereotyped Muslims, Muslim-Americans, and several ethnic groups on four different trait dimensions: In […]

Erica Chenoweth on some of the strategic aspects of the bombing: The blasts were near-simultaneous and co-located in a way that was sure to inflict maximal damage. One cannot necessarily assume intentionality from actions, but in this case the clear consequences of the bombs’ placement was to kill or wound many people — runners, spectators, […]