Joshua Tucker

For another perspective on the aftermath of the British riots, we are very pleased to welcome the following guest post from Erik Bleich, a professor of political science at Middlebury College who writes on race and ethnicity in Western Europe. His book The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to […]

Political scientists David Campbell and Robert Putnam report on what a panel survey of 3,000 Americans conducted in 2006 and 2011 has to tell us about the supporters of the Tea Party in The NY Times. Among their conclusions: The Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, […]

We are very pleased to welcome the following guest post from Rafaela Dancygier, a political scientist at Princeton University who has studied the causes of urban unrest involving immigrants in Europe. ************** Thirty years ago, London was swept by a series of riots causing major property damage and leading to hundreds of arrests. Back then, […]

About four weeks ago—in the midst of the negotiations over extending the US debt ceiling—I was talking with a British friend of mine, and he asked me what President Obama meant when said he was going to take the argument to the people. I explained that this meant he was going to give a speech, […]

Here are a few quick observations about what recent events in London can teach us about the relationship between social media and collective action. First, those of us who study protest I think originally focused on the potential for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to help citizens in authoritarian societies to outmaneuver authorities bent […]

Just in case you were getting tired of all debt crisis all the time, here’s a couple of interesting pieces of news about last season’s big news, the Arab Spring, or, more specifically, about developments in Egypt. First, the Atlantic Monthly has the following fascinating chart of the day, on the approval rating of the […]

Provocative commentary by LZ Granderson, a CNN columnist, on CNN.com. Granderson writes in regard to the debt crisis: ..over the past three weeks, we’ve seen just about every act there is to this political theater and, staying true to the time of Shakespeare, it seems every character is played by a man. Odds are that […]

I’ve been thinking about tourists on the East Coast this week, and it made me wonder why people don’t hedge their vacations? I’m not talking about what passes for “flight insurance” (insure your flight for only $32.67, but note the 75,000 instances in which we actually won’t refund the cost of your ticket after you […]

I want to return to some points that kind of got buried (but were addressed in the comments section) of my post last week about the consequences of economic voting models for thinking about how a politically minded opposition ought to behave vis a vis the economy. I initially tried to point out what seemed […]

So John’s post inspired me to write on a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Let’s posit the following three assumptions: Incumbent US presidents perform worse when economic conditions are worse. If the US defaults on its debt, there could be catastrophic consequences for the US economy. The number one goal of […]