Richard Skinner

Ambition is the fuel that makes American politics run: ambition to win office, ambition to hold onto office, ambition to move up the “ladder” of office. But there are other reasons for seeking office. A candidate may want to promote a set of ideas. She may believe that her party deserves representation, even if she’s […]

Despite the severity of the scandal enmeshing FIFA, Sepp Blatter was nonetheless re-elected as president on May 29. He resigned a few days later, but it still shocked many that he won another term at all. Blatter’s (brief) survival owed much to the structure of FIFA, in which each of the 203 members (no matter […]

In the wake of Marco Rubio’s presidential announcement, much punditry has likened him to another young senator with an exotic name and a thin resume: Barack Obama in 2008. But I think that the differences between the two men are as telling as the similarities. In addition, there are some shared qualities that may have […]

With the announcement of Jeb Bush’s 501 (c) 4 organization, Right to Rise Policy Solutions, we are seeing a new assault on the most fundamental principles of the campaign finance system. Jennifer Nicoll Victor provides an excellent backgrounder on this threat. 501 (c) 4 nonprofit organizations are intended to engage in “social welfare” functions; they […]

Despite promising my wife that I would not add to our home’s existing glut of books, I picked up three books at the APSA annual meeting, mostly for free. One was Richard Norton Smith’s On His Own Terms, a long-awaited biography of Nelson Rockefeller. I don’t have much to add to reviews by Timothy Noah, […]

We could call 2014 a surprising unsurprising election. Republican gains proved larger than most anticipated. But there were few shockers in statewide races; instead, Republicans simply won most of the competitive contests. For all the talk of anti-incumbency, only three sitting governors lost. The bigger surprise was the number of controversial governors who won re-election: […]

It’s so tempting to mock Mark Halperin’s recent piece on Jeb Bush’s 2016 prospects. Yes, it is nuts to imagine the former governor carrying California or New Jersey, except in the context of a historic landslide in which those states would be irrelevant to the outcome. It’s not so crazy to see him seriously contesting […]

Like Hans, I attended the American University conference on “American Gridlock: Causes, Characteristics, and Consequences of Polarization.” Brandon Bartels of George Washington University wrote one of my favorite papers, especially since it confirmed what I already suspected. Supreme Court justices increasingly vote along predictable lines, defined by party and ideology. Fewer justices “surprise” the presidents […]

Facebook recently did a study of baseball fandom on-line, including a map of Facebookers’ favorite teams. Upshot did it even better, producing a map that goes down to the zip-code level. Naturally, this appealed to me as a political scientist. Let me explain. There’s much overlap between sports fans and political junkies. Team fandom and […]

If Jeb Bush’s biggest vulnerability may be immigration, Rand Paul’s leading problem as a presidential aspirant is his views on foreign policy. Despite attempts to recast himself as a “realist,” Paul has broken with the foreign policy not merely of George W. Bush, but of most Republicans of the past 60 years. Republican elites are […]