Seth Masket

Reihan Salam asks why Romney appears to be losing the presidential race, and suggests that the answer is that he’s running too conventional a campaign. Salam outlines some ideas for a more bold and daring campaign in which Romney would take on a populist veneer, bashing the big banks and advocating a tax reform package […]

Do the rules governing primary elections affect the behavior of elected officials? I’ve mentioned some earlier research suggesting that it doesn’t. But Michael Alvarez and Betsy Sinclair have a new article out indicating the opposite. In their paper “Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior,” just out with Political Research Quarterly, they do a social network analysis of […]

Jonathan Martin wrote in Politico recently about Obama’s “problem in the South.” Now, there are a number of important problems with this article (e.g.: this), although, in fairness, Martin is trying to deal with an important and pretty intractable issue. I don’t know who exactly thought that Obama’s election would transform race relations in the South, […]

I’m not surprised this statistic hasn’t gotten a lot of attention so far, even though it’s probably the fairest way to compare across countries. Update: I’m not sure if this is a fairer measure, but here’s medals won per million citizens. North Korea is still looking pretty solid, but Hungary’s stomping the world. Oh, and […]

The new numbers on 2nd quarter growth in gross domestic product came out this morning, showing that the economy grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate in the 2nd quarter. They’re the sort of economic figures we’ve come to expect of late — not a recession, but pretty far from robust growth. But what can […]

I was pleased and grateful to read this editorial in Nature in defense of National Science Foundation funding for political science. It’s frankly nice to know that someone’s got our back at a time when people want to defund political science because we’re not sufficiently scientific, or we make lousy predictions, or just ‘cuz. But […]

Susan Schulten has a new blog called Mapping the Nation, which is a companion to her new book of the same name, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. In a recent post, she highlights Walter Houghton’s mesmerizing timeline called “Conspectus of the History of Political Parties,” made in 1880. You can see an image of […]

I was recently giving some lectures on the topic of presidential elections at a family summer camp in the Sierras (great gig, by the way). I was trying to give the audience a sense of what actually affected votes (i.e.: income growth in the election year, wars) and what didn’t (i.e.: pretty much everything else). […]