Joshua Tucker

[Artist unknown; making the rounds on the web…] [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent decision to “accept” current Russian president Dmitri Medvedev’s invitation to run for president again in 2012 is… interesting. Here are a number of expert opinions (courtesy of my colleagues in the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia ) in response to Vladimir Putin’s decision to […]

Courtesy of official Monkey Cage Cartoonist Ted McCagg [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith are professors of politics at New York University. They write about the choices facing leaders in “The Dictator’s Handbook” (Public Affairs Press, 2011). The book provides an intuitive, example-driven introduction to politics that covers aspects of political economy, comparative politics and international relations and is based on over […]

As a follow up to my post from earlier this week, here are some incredible new numbers from the latest CBS News/NY Times poll: 12% (!) of Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job 19% approve of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their job 28% approve of the way Democrats […]

A couple years ago, when Scott Brown won his special Senate Election in Massachusetts, I made a before and after graph showing that little had changed in terms of the balance of power in Washington, and that people should just calm down a bit in terms of all the “everything is going to be different […]

Especially in the aftermath of yesterday’s debate, we are going to hear a lot about whether Romney was successful in presenting Perry as unelectable (see here, here, and here for example). We’ve heard the same about Bachman, Paul, and Palin. So with that in mind, I want to throw out a provocative question: how much […]

With the (I guess still impending) fall of Qadaffi and the future of Libya moving front and center on to the radar screens of many, there will inevitably by many discussions in the coming months of the resource curse. With that in mind, we are pleased to welcome the following guest post from Samuel Greene […]

From the perspective of someone who knows little about Libya but has spent a lot of time studying transitions from communism (both to democracy and autocracy) in East-Central Europe and former Soviet Union, here are what I think are three important things to keep an eye on in Libya in the coming months: 1) Outsiders […]

In response to my post last week regarding the empirical link between parliamentary systems of government and AAA sovereign debt ratings, Monkey Cage reader and Temple University professor Christopher Wlezien sent along the following comment: This is interesting Josh. It also may relate to what Stuart Soroka and I argue (and sort of show) in […]