Joshua Tucker

Continuing on with my sports theme from yesterday, I share the following commentary from frequent Monkey Cage contributor and Georgetown University professor James Vreeland. One way to look at yesterday’s stunning US victory over Brazil in the Women’s World Cup is as everything that is wonderful (or horrible, I guess, if you are reading this […]

One of the features that will surely differentiate the 2012 US presidential elections from the 2010 midterm elections will be higher turnout: people the world over are more likely to turn out in more important elections, and there is a long pattern of precisely this behavior in US presidential and midterm elections. Received wisdom regarding […]

The New York Times has a feature article today on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The main thrust of the article is the difficulties Ahmadinejad is facing because of his conflict with the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As the Times notes: The system allows for two presidents, one divine, the other democratic. The divine […]

As Michele Bachmann continues to attract increasing attention following her performance in last week’s Republican presidential debate, questions will once again be asked about the unique challenges facing female candidates running for political office in the United States. One of these challenges is known as the “double bind”. As with men, if women do not […]

More timely political science research on the consequences of political sex scandals: Adam Berinsky, Vincent Hutchings, Tali Mendelberg, Lee Shaker, and Nicholas Valentino have an article ( gated ; ungated) in the current issue of Political Behavior that explores the relationship between a politician’s race and citizens’ reactions to sex scandals. Here’s the abstract: A […]

I received an email from a reader that raises some interesting questions in response to this article in the Washington Post. The story concerns the court case of former NSA executive Thomas A. Drake. Here’s the content of the email: I’d be interested in anyone’s thoughts on this story, the former NSA manager being tried […]

One of the main goals of The Monkey Cage, the blog for which I write, is to facilitate the use of political science research in our understanding of contemporary political developments and to inform matters of policy debate. One way to do this is to try to make political science research accessible to policy makers. […]

Courtesy of the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post: The wordle represents the frequency of answers in a May 26-29, 2011 survey where respondents were asked for one word to describe the Republican candidates for president. More bad news for the candidates from the survey: Even Republicans and Republican-leaning independents use mostly negative words […]

With mounting evidence of the Syrian regime’s willingness to resort to the use of unrestrained force to try to stop protests in that country (see here, here, and here), including the use of soccer stadiums to hold prisoners, I wanted to draw attention to a point I made in my original comments about the usefulness […]

In the spirit of Lee Sigelman, I enjoyed a beautiful bike ride yesterday morning which ended up at one of New York City’s famed West Village cafes. While there, I observed a couple of local police officers coming in for coffee, and they seemed to be paying a different price that I was. I relayed […]