FOX News just announced the 10 candidates who will participate in the first primetime Republican presidential primary debate on August 6, 2015. The top 10 were decided by these procedures. Given that FOX is arguably playing a huge role in the free-for-all-for-the-GOP’s-Soul that is that race for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, it is important to consider whether, and to what … Read more
The rise of mega-donors has been an important storyline in the unfolding drama of the 2016 presidential election (for example, see here). The presence of these donors in the political game (or at least their visibility) is partially the result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. But more interesting is whether the rise of these mega-donors has caused the … Read more
You know where you are? You’re down in the jungle baby, you’re gonna die… In the jungle…welcome to the jungle…. Watch it bring you to your knees, knees… – Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle” It’s a jungle out there, and … Read more
This great post by Nate Silver on fivethirtyeight.com prodded me to think again about how we measure residential segregation. As I am moving from St. Louis to Chicago,[1] this topic is of great personal interest to me. Silver’s post names Chicago as the most segregated major city in the United States, according to what one might call a “relative” measure. … Read more
[This is the first ever guest post on Math Of Politics. If you’re interested in posting on Math Of Politics, drop me an email.] By Scott Ainsworth. To understand the Cotton letter, we need to think about the operation of treaties. Treaties are like contracts, designed to solidify current behaviors or constrain future behaviors for some period of … Read more
Vaccination, both in terms of its social good and the role of government in securing that social good while respecting individual liberty, has been a hot topic lately. In fact, it’s gone viral. (HAHAHAHA. Sorry.) In this short post, I link the debate about vaccination, liberty, and social welfare, with the work of Amartya Sen, a preeminent … Read more
The Greek Tragedy is a “thing.” And lately it has reemerged. The question at the heart of this post is how one should bargain when between a rock and hard place.[0] This point was raised and discussed very well by Henry Farrell in this piece, which was responding to this op-ed in the NY Times by Yanis Varoufakis, the … Read more
The recent events in Montana have sparked a broad debate about the ethics of field experiments (I’ve written once and twice about it, and other recent posts include this letter from Dan Carpenter, this Upshot post by Derek Willis, and this Monkey Cage post by Dan Drezner). I wanted to continue a point that I … Read more
Nothing gets political scientists as excited as elections. In this previous post, I discussed the Montana field experiment controversy. In that post, I pointed out that the ethics of field experiments in elections—e.g., in which some people are given additional information and others are not—are complicated. In the majority of the post, I was attempting to … Read more
Three political scientists have recently attracted a great deal of attention because they sent mailers to 100,000 Montana voters. The basics of the story are available elsewhere (see the link above), so I’ll move along to my points. The researchers’ study is being criticized on at least three grounds, and I’ll respond to two of these, setting the third … Read more