For my first Duck post to be so parochial is a shame, but I can’t resist commenting on the result of Labour’s leadership election, declared a couple of hours ago. For someone such as myself who was once, briefly, one of Ralph Miliband’s students at LSE in the 1960s, the idea that the son of the author of Parliamentary Socialism should now be the leader of the British Labour Party is weird. That he should have obtained that post by beating his...
Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected...
Former President Clinton jumped into the Mideast Peace process earlier this week. According to Josh Rogin's reporting at The Cable, Clinton met with a group of reporters and, when asked to comment about the current negotiations, began by saying:"I wouldn't say too much about this if Hillary weren't Secretary of State and in charge of these negotiations, so I'm darned sure not going to say too much now."Ah, but that's not like Mr. Clinton.And it...
I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read. A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an...
Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a...
Joshua Busby has a new book out on transnational campaigns that might be the best new contribution to the advocacy networks literature since Keck and Sikkink's original Activists Beyond Borders. In Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, Busby proposes a theory of the conditions under which such movements succeed at securing commitments from states: Whether states accept commitments made by principled advocacy movements depends primarily on how...
Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting...
How does America's bloated anti-terror bureaucracy spend its time and our money? A story out of Pennsylvania last week throws light on the earth-shakingly important work these saviors of our soil perform, defending us all from the scary monsters who pose such a dire menace to America.Or rather it illustrates, yet again, the myriad ways in which our homeland security hogs work to rationalize their existence and perpetuate their wallow in the...
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks. They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic. What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can...
I've been wondering when the Locke/Demosthenes effect would manifest itself through the faux political rivalry of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Could this be their moment? Stewart on the need to return to a deliberative ethic in American democracy - best if viewed starting @ 2:10 below:The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cRally to Restore Sanitywww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea PartyColbert's...
Lots of noise of late about the "relevance" question in political science, some of it thoughtful, so of it not so much. While this is obviously an old question -- indeed, in some ways, it's the oldest question in the discipline, dating back to the original efforts to place the study of politics on some kind of scientific footing in the early part of the 20th century -- I find myself thinking about it a lot these days, both in the context of...
In addition to being blown away by the recent Duck facelift (ht to Dan), you may have also noticed a slight shuffling in the roster. Congratulations to Stephanie Carvin, Laura Sjoberg, Vikash Yadav, all of whom are now officially (to quote Stephanie) "perma-ducks." Some of our other guest bloggers have stepped aside for now. We are grateful to Tony Lang, Mlada Bukovansky, Drew Conway, Daniel McIntosh and Craig Hayden for their contributions to...