Month: June 2011
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Historical context on presidential “flakes”
On “Fox News Sunday,” Chris Wallace asked Michele Bachmann “Are you a flake?,” prompting a backlash that forced Wallace to apologize: Some commentators have suggested that Wallace’s question was sexist. I agree that “flake” is a pejorative term that seems to be disproportionately applied to women, but it’s worth noting that in presidential politics the
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed (6/20-6/27) Brendan Nyhan Jun 27, 2011 at 2:38 PM Powered by Keepstream BrendanNyhan Brendan Nyhan Highly recommended RT @monkeycageblog: Political Science and Gay Marriage in New York http://t.co/2RDQZ2s Political Science and Gay Marriage in New York — The Monkey Cage A Monkey Cage reader, Jeff, emailed me and wrote: I’ll speak to
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Will Americans blame Bush for the economy in 2012?
Matthew Yglesias takes heart in polling showing many Americans still blame President Bush for the state of the economy: One gripe I hear fairly often around DC is the idea that President Obama has failed to do an adequate job of reminding the public about the disastrous legacy of the George W Bush administration. The
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed (6/14-6/20) Brendan Nyhan Jun 20, 2011 at 11:45 AM Powered by Keepstream BrendanNyhan Brendan Nyhan Cool new dynamic forecasting model for state-level presidential election outcomes from Emory’s Drew Linzer http://t.co/FmieQ1Q (PDF) http://userwww.service.emory.e du/~dlinzer/Linzer-prestracker .pdf Jun 20, 2011 at 4:18 PM BrendanNyhan Brendan Nyhan Remember ’08 was uniform swing, not much state variation MT
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Thomas Friedman turns lemonade into lemons
Yesterday’s Thomas Friedman column featured this clunker of a lede: While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten a lot of things right on foreign policy, they’ve made quite a mess in Israeli-Palestinian relations… Then again, the actors they’ve had to work with were both lemons… But you know what they say
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New paper on causal inference in social networks
Hans Noel and I have a forthcoming paper on the difficulties of estimating causal effects in longitudinal social network data that is now available online from Social Networks (gated). Here’s the abstract: The “unfriending” problem: The consequences of homophily in friendship retention for causal estimates of social influence An increasing number of scholars are using
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed (6/1-6/14) Brendan Nyhan Jun 14, 2011 at 3:02 PM Powered by Keepstream BrendanNyhan Brendan Nyhan Possible first Obama scandal – “Lawmakers press feds for documents on cartel gun sales” http://j.mp/m5A3A2 Hearing Wed.: http://j.mp/lWbFTX Lawmakers press feds for documents on cartel gun sales | Chronicle | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle WASHINGTON – House
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Does legislative gridlock cause scandal?
On Tuesday, the blogger Nicholas Beaudrot suggested that the lack of legislative productivity in Congress was an underlying cause of the frenzy over Rep. Anthony Weiner’s online behavior: A conversation with a friend of mine helped me put a finger on just why it is that DC news coverage has felt like it’s had zero