Many conversations about the empirical relevance of game-theoretic models of war begin and end with Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's War and Reason. That's unfortunate, but it's not exactly surprising. Most game-theoretic studies of war do not include any empirical...
Florida Governor Rick Scott is considering changing the cost of different college majors at Florida's public colleges to influence students' choices. The reasoning is standard rightist dirigisme:...
Last year Nate Silver posted numbers going back to 1972. Bottom line: for Obama and Romney to be running roughly even at this point tracks with 2004--and represents an improvement for the Democrat...
Follow Mitt Romney's storm tips on twitter. Remember that Sandy has already killed over 60 people in the Caribbean, and that many of those deaths are tied (in one way or another) to the unequal...
The staff of the Duck of Minerva is very pleased to announce: (1) the first-ever blogging reception at the International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention; and (2) the Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Awards. Thanks to the generous support of SAGE and the efforts of SAGE editor David Mainwaring, we will be hosting a reception at the 2013 International Studies Association Annual Convention in San Francisco. Details to follow in updates, but the reception is scheduled for the night of Thursday, April 4th. A number of prominent bloggers will give brief Ignite-style...
I'm guessing we'll get more of the standard fare tonight: that the Benghazi attacks were bad; that Iran has to be deterred (will Romney bring Bibi's bomb sketch?), that Syria is tragic, that the Arab Spring is scary, and that China and Russia are both really mean. Afghanistan will get some attention, Iraq almost none. Apparently, Bob Schieffer is not going to address a broader list but if he does, here are three issues I'd like to see addressed by the two candidates: 1. The debt, budget deficits, American hegemony, and American consumption are inextricably linked --...
Dan Drezner is very unhappy about the outline for tonight's foreign-policy debate. If he's got the list of sections right, I'll be pretty outraged as well. So I guess we'll just talk the drinking game. My suggestions: take a swig of your favorite beverage whenever you hear: "resolve," "apologize," "values," "economy." "credibility," "unravelling," "strength," "exceptionalism," "that's just not true," "energy independence,"and "kill." David Shorr preps us for the pain and suffering. Morton Abramowitz tackles "American Exceptionalism," which seems relevant. More Linkage below the fold:...
To the best of my knowledge, no prominent peer-reviewed article in political science has reported a difference in the frequency with which the United States enters into conflict under Democratic presidents relative to Republican presidents. That's not because no one has looked for such a difference (I know I have). It's because, to date, no one has found one. This is the file drawer problem in action. Now, we want to be careful not to over-interpret that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There could be lots of reasons why we might fail to observe such a difference even if...
No, not conscription (see what I did there), but sports drafts where teams take turns picking the next generation of superstars/busts. I am inspired to think about this as October is when anxiety of academic job aspirants begins to spiral. The thread du jour is whether the job market is "fair." As some get heaps of love and attention, others do not, leading them to ponder their fate. But if we think about the job market as a draft* (despite the fact that there really is no set order of who goes first), then some stuff makes sense: * Am focusing on NFL and NBA as they are better known...
PG-13 lyrics. Via Kieran Healy.
As readers have likely noticed, we're in the process of shifting from our temporary template to what will likely be our permanent one. Laura S. is still working out some of the glitches created by the shift, such as the fact that our sidebar is displaying below the main blog! It will probably be a bit before everything works properly and we've introduced all of the changes associated with the new template. Thanks for your patience. A few links: The continuing saga of Gallup's likely voter model as covered by Huffington Post's Pollster. A comparison of NAMA and FROB from A Fistful of Euros --...
Guest Post by Andrew Mack, Human Security Report Project. We obviously agree with Megan Mackenzie’s affirmation that the mainstream narrative on wartime sexual violence ignores sexual violence against males and domestic sexual violence––even though the latter is far more prevalent than rape by combatants. With respect to other claims in her review of our just-released Human Security Report we disagree: We did not “revive” the “war is declining” thesis about inter-state conflict —the focus of successive Human Security Reports has been all conflicts—the overwhelming majority of which are...