Everybody’s talking about nuclear war with Russia right now and it bugs me, not least because I’ve seen this nuclear frenzy before. Now, I think people have good reason to be worried about Russian nuclear use, as I wrote some five months ago. But...
This is a guest post from Shana Gadarian and Dan McDowell, both Associate Professors at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Earlier this month, after Chinese authorities reportedly...
Rob Farley has posted a Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast discussing my new research with Alex Montgomery on why reports of Americans' willingness to target civilians have been greatly exaggerated....
Last week, Dina Smeltz, Jordan Tama, and I had a piece in the Monkey Cage on the results of our 2018 survey of 588 foreign policy opinion leaders. We found that these opinion leaders misestimated...
One nice thing about a status-quo election: it doesn't leave international-affairs experts with a great deal to prognosticate on. It will be interesting to see if the administration does, indeed, show more "flexibility" on BMD cooperation with Moscow and if it makes a push on Israel-Palestine. We...
It was sort of sad watching conservatives play the same game that we did in 2004. Poll aggregation + 1; bubblethought -15.
Amazing how the Simpsons is still pretty funny after 25 years… In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I’d list the reasons why I voted the way I did. I know conservative media regularly accuse professors of politicizing the classroom, but an honest discussion of why one chooses the...
One reason we decided to move to WordPress is superior podcast support. Of course, there's a learning curve involved. So this is a test run of the new podcast feed. If it works, you should have the option of playing my interview with Janice Bially Mattern directly from this post. That's all,...
US citizens who haven't voted early should exercise axiological rationality and cast their ballots. If you live in Maryland, please consider voting "yes" on Question 6. John Sides takes umbrage at Michael Gerson's attacks on political science. If you squint hard enough at Gerson's arguments then...
Electoral Outcomes For obvious reasons, I'm much less confident of my predictions in 2012 than in 2008. I think there's a good chance that Florida, Colorado, and Virginia might go the other way. North Carolina and New Hampshire could as well. Regardless, it looks pretty likely that Obama is going...
My good friend and awesome protest/network scholar Michael Heaney at the University of Michigan has released a documentary film, THE ACTIVISTS: WAR, PEACE, AND POLITICS IN THE STREETS. The film is with Melody Weinstein and Marco Roldán and, in addition to the central message of the film, shows the...
Laleh Khalili's Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, 2012) looks fascinating. An interesting piece by Karen Burhnam (at SF Signal) on what the discovery of a rocky planet around Alpha Centauri means for human deep-space exploration. Alexandra Gheciu at CIPSBlog on...
The first posting of some of the audio from this weekend's ISA-Northeast conference is up over on my syndication site. This one is from a panel called "Whither Constructivism?" featuring Nick Onuf, Mike Barnett, and me, chaired by Sammy Barkin. I'll get the audio from the methodology workshop up...
On Interstate 71, south of Columbus; Ohio’s most famous sign So it’s election time, which means CNN, etc. will be filled with pundits with only the vaguest credentials – never any PhDs - telling you why the outcome inevitably had to be such-and-such. (Retrodiction is so insufferably smug.)...
As this election is, by many accounts, "too close to call," I've generated different opening paragraphs for November 7. Each, I hope, confirms the retrospective "conventional wisdom." 1. If Romney wins a decisive victory In a surprisingly decisive victory that will draw inevitable comparisons to...
Via reader JW, an exceptional experiment from Yale: In a field experiment conducted during trick-or-treating at Halloween, we find that a visual cue of Michelle Obama prompts almost twice as many children age 9 and over to choose fruit over candy, compared to a visual cue of Ann Romney. This...