Seth Masket

What makes an interest group influential? In a new article in Interest Groups and Advocacy (currently ungated), Michael Heaney and Geoffrey Lorenz argue that a group becomes influential not because of its work in a single coalition, but rather because of its larger portfolio of work in various coalitions on a range of policy issues. However, […]

Scary story from today’s Denver Post: Nearly one-third of the crimes committed in Denver occur within 1,000 feet of a medical marijuana dispensary, according to new statistics provided by the city Wednesday. Yikes! Sounds like those pot clinics are a cause of crime in Denver. Are they? Let’s look at some basic math: Number of […]

For support for same-sex marriage to gain such momentum in the Senate in a matter of just a few years, there had to be a critical mass of senators who were willing to go there first. And it was the Senate’s Jewish members who led the way. So concludes a really interesting post by Shanna […]

This FoxNews.com interview with Zealot author Reza Aslan has been making the rounds over the past few days. The entire interview is fascinating, both for the content of Aslan’s book (basically, the historical and political context of Jesus’ life) and for the Fox reporter’s interrogation of him. But really, you can get almost everything you need to know […]

Lynn Bartels had the lead story in yesterday’s Denver Post, noting that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper’s (D) longstanding and tightly-managed image as a moderate is crumbling, just as his reelection campaign is beginning in earnest. The piece has lots of good quotes from Colorado politicos on both sides, speculating on whether Hickenlooper has changed or […]

According to Slate, three out of four Americans consider our political parties to be corrupt. This is based on a report by Transparency International. Indeed, the parties appear to be more corrupt by this metric than any other governing institution. Are they? As Andrew Scott Waugh (via Facebook) notes, this claim rests on two very […]

I’ve just returned from the European Political Science Association conference in Barcelona. One of the more interesting papers I saw was a study of the effect of polling on campaigns. In the paper, Philipp Denter and Dana Sisak note that dozens of democracies have bans on polling late in the campaign season. In France, for example, no […]

[Spoilers ahead] The new “Man of Steel” is largely faithful to earlier depictions of the Superman story (at least on film and television — I am admittedly not well versed on the comic books), but it does make a few interesting departures. One of those is that we get a rather lengthy early segment set […]

The above Pew poll, noting that Democrats are basically okay with NSA domestic surveillance under President Obama but were outraged by it under President Bush (and vice versa for Republicans), is getting a lot of attention lately. (See, for example, here and here.) The general interpretation is that partisans are basically hypocrites. Like studies showing […]