Tag Archives: political science

1.0 Introduction This post deals with a set of ideas that I find appealing, but contradictory. I know I do not fully understand many of them. Perhaps somebody who understands more can either agree with me that there are contradictions here or point to some way of resolving them. This post is also more about current events than is typical of my posts. 2.0 Ideological Thinking, Ideological Identification, And Party Identification Consider Philip Converse's claim that a mass majority of the...

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described. He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Above: Some lessons from Rachel Glennerster on policy vs. academic research paths Nick Kristof talks with Amanda Glassman at the Center for Global Development about trying to get the world’s attention to alleviation of poverty and suffering. (FYI there are a number of tools that will let you covert youtube videos to audio MP3 to listen to like podcasts). A nice pair of short podcasts with Alice Evans and David Evans (who are...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Preregistration stops medications from working Tyler Cowen interviewed Chris Blattman and in typical Cowen fashion came prepared – I had to slow down my usual podcast playback speed to keep up. Topics Included what Chris learned from his first job at a higher class Canadian KFC, interviewing child soldiers, causes of the Peloponnesian Wars, why he’d rather transfer accountants to poor countries than cash, and how he tries to...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Markus Goldstein reports on a study from India which finds that paying respondents for their time participating might change their responses. There’s a bipartisan bill to create a new U.S. overseas development finance agency. It would combine several private sector-focused functions that currently exist across different agencies, offer higher spending caps, and would be allowed to make equity investments. There’s a long and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. IPA is offering funding for research on ideas about “Peace and Recovery” very broadly defined – looking to test new ideas for counteracting violence (including state and electoral), helping refugees, recovery from humanitarian crises, or countering extremism, and is accepting proposals from Ph.D. students. (The photo above is from research in a Colombian FARC demobilization camp). Expressions of Interest are due NEXT FRIDAY...

One of the things Chris is up to these days is being the academic lead for the new Peace and Recovery Initiative at IPA, which is looking to fund research about fragile states, repression, reducing crime and violence, and recovery from humanitarian disasters. Deadline for proposals is March 2 (that’s one short month), and please share with colleagues. But even for general interest reading, I recommend this “guiding principles” document, which is also a very readable summary of what Chris...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Pardon our remodeling! Chris is migrating his site to new servers, our apologies for any recent downtime. FYI that we’re still getting SSL worked out so your browser might warn you the website is insecure (just offering http not https). I don’t really know what that means for a blog, but just in case, don’t put your bank account number in the comments section until it’s worked out? In the meantime I’m reposting last week’s links...