The recent U.S. election has beeen puzzling for many people. The prediction modelers clearly got it wrong, but many of the national polls had the election within the margin of error. The exit polls are showing something that has been slowly happening for years – white, uneducated, unskilled, men have turned against the Democratic party […]
In late October I presented a discussion of the Brexit vote for the Missouri Southern State University themed semester on the U.K. I present an original analysis of the Wave 7 British Election Study, attempting to disentangle who voted to leave the EU and why. It is clear from the data that, like the recent […]
The Experimental Prediction In past posts I outlined two different equilibria from my Wartime Elections game which sets the stage in the first chapter of my dissertation. See here for the Opposing Victory equilibrium and here for the Prolonging Defeat equilibrium. In the game the public is given two signals in the context of an election where the nation is engaged in a salient […]
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear I watched this documentary last night. Like most documentaries most of the information is true but framed in a way which persuades viewers to come to a certain conclusion. The documentary’s thesis (if you want to call it that) argues that for the last 60 or […]
Often I get into a debate with people (mostly students) about the role of morality in politics. The argument usually begins after I after I have articulated some theory of politics which invokes incentive based explanations for some phenomena where the outcome is normatively distasteful. The view that political actors should act in some way preferable to one’s subjective morals […]