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Perry’s challenges in Dartmouth GOP debate
Going into tonight’s GOP debate at Dartmouth College (where I am a faculty member), the challenge for Rick Perry, as TAP’s Jamelle Bouie notes, is to reassure nervous elites that he’s a capable national-level candidate while attracting support from anti-Romney conservatives who have swung toward Herman Cain: Romney is leading the field with 38 percent
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New column on Obama/Truman differences
I have a new column at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball on why Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against the “Do-Nothing Congress” may be a misleading model for President Obama: [T]he dramatic narrative of Truman’s victory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. As University at Buffalo, SUNY political scientist James Campbell pointed out in 2004 (gated), Truman’s comeback
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The unwritten rules of academia
My friend and former UM RWJ colleague Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana University, has a new ebook based on his popular series of Grad School Rulz posts on the Orgtheory blog. If you’re in a Ph.D. program or thinking about pursuing a career in academia, this is a necessary purchase (especially for only
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NYT seduced by neuroscience again
Here’s a scientific article that needs careful attention among editors of the New York Times op-ed page: The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to
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Does Obama face a racial double standard?
Writing in The Nation, Tulane political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that President Obama may be suffering from “liberal electoral racism,” which she defines as “the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.” After arguing that Obama’s record of progressive achievements is comparable to President Clinton’s, she
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New Twitter-free RSS feed
Thanks to a tip from Lorin Hochstein, I was able to set up an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes that excludes the Twitter roundups. I would recommend switching to that if you use RSS/Google Reader to follow the blog and prefer not to read them. Hope this setup works better for everyone; please let me
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Will Solyndra be the first major Obama scandal?
Back in May, I wrote an article drawing on my research into presidential scandal (PDF) which noted that Obama had managed to avoid a major scandal for more than two years: One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal
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Twitter roundup
Many thanks to everyone for their emails and comments in response to my request for feedback on the Twitter roundups. Enough people seem to find them useful that I would like to keep them, but I want to try to make the blog more useful to those who don’t. As a first step, I’m now
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Beware early general election trial heats
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that President Obama leading Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in the prospective general election polls known as trial heats. New TNR columnist/blogger Timothy Noah suggested that Obama’s standing was “remarkable” and that the poll showed that the GOP candidates “are unable to capitalize on the miserable state of
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New research on political misperceptions
My co-author Jason Reifler and I have just posted a new manuscript (PDF) titled “Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions.” It’s one of the followups to our Political Behavior article (PDF) on resistance to corrective information. Here’s the abstract: People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting