Joshua Tucker

Apropos of John’s post from earlier in the week, here’s some additional evidence that people are still paying attention to the issue of gun control a month out from the Newtown tragedy: The data are from a collection of 5 million + tweets that we’ve collected at the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) […]

Earlier today David Cameron made public what had been speculated for a while now: if the Conservatives are re-elected to another term in office, then the UK will hold an in/out referendum on EU membership in 2017 or 2018. A country voluntarily leaving the EU would of course be unprecedented. However, it is possible that […]

The New York Times reports: Mr. McConnell did say he would favor reform if it was “revenue neutral,” meaning that any new tax revenue would be matched by spending cuts. I can think of two ways to define “revenue neutral”, neither of which would be what McConnell is describing. Invertorwords.com defines revenue neutral as a […]

For Christmas Eve, I featured a guest post from  Dr. Will Jennings, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Southampton, which noted a growing trend in the percentage of survey respondents ascribing a partisan preference to Santa Claus from 1998-2001.  Unfortunately, those two data points missed most of the Bush 43 years and all of […]

One of the ways people have responded to the horrors of Newtown has been through the use of social media. I don’t know if my experiences are typical, but I actually learned about Newtown from posts on Facebook, and over the ensuing hours my Facebook feed was filled with responses to the tragedy. My initial […]

In the aftermath of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, there has been a lot of discussion about the relative prevalence of gun ownership in the United States as opposed to other countries (see here, here, and here for example). Of course, measuring gun ownership cross-nationally is complicated. One source of data is the Small Arms […]

Social networking has spread around the world with remarkable speed. In countries such as Britain, the United States, Russia, the Czech Republic and Spain, about half of all adults now use Facebook and similar websites. These sites are also popular in many lower-income nations, where, once people have access to the internet, they tend to […]

With record numbers of women elected to the US Congress in last month’s elections, some in the media have brought out the “year of the woman” moniker to describe this election.  Of course, “record number” means approximately 100 women across the House and Senate, or, put another way, still less than 20% of Congress.  With women […]

Big shout out to my mom, who has a letter to the editor in the New York Times today: To the Editor: Re “We Need to Retreat From the Beach,” by Orrin H. Pilkey (Op-Ed, Nov. 15): My father, who retired in 1975, was chief of the North Atlantic Division of the Army Corps of […]

If you open this week’s Economist, you will find what is becoming a familiar line about spending on US elections: The election cycle that has just limped to its exhausted conclusion cost around $6 billion—a new record, as in every new presidential cycle. But when you consider that Americans were electing on November 6th not […]