Equal Time

A recent article in the George Washington Law Review by Robert Chesney (at Wake Forest) finds that the Bush Administration is not necessarily using executive privilege more than previous administrations.

As The Monkey Cage reports, Chesney finds, "that since the seminal Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Reynolds in 1953), there has been a sharp rise in invocations of the privilege, but most of that upward trend occurred during the 1980s, not since 2001. From 2001 through 2006, the Bush administration invoked the privilege a total of 20 times — an average of about 3.3 times per year. By comparison, between 1991 and 2000, Bush’s immediate predecessors, the senior Bush and the putatively first Clinton, tallied an average of 2.6 such assertions per year, up from Reagan and Bush’s average of 2.3 per year between 1981 and 1990. Thus, an upward trend in recent years, but in Chesney’s judgment (and, for that matter, according to by conventional statistical criteria) not a significant one."

Books, IQ, and Facebook

Can book preferences on Facebook tell you much about a particular school or attendee? See this link.

Are there any problems with the research design? What are they?

Ferrets?

Here are some clips from a new "Best In Show" type documentary on PBS.

from the Monkey Cage:
"...A DVD version is available for purchase. As a prudent consumer, you may prefer to try it before you buy it. Here and here and here and here, then, are some snippets for your consideration. Try this movie and you’ll be charmed by the sheer looniness of it all."

Notes on democratic peace

Here are the notes for Thursday, 1/24.

Here are the notes for Tuesday, 1/29.

And here are the notes for Thursday, 1/31.

Rambo-like Inflation

Number of people killed per minute in the Rambo series.

• Rambo: First Blood (1982): 0.01

• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): 0.72

• Rambo III (1988): 1.30

• Rambo IV (2008): 2.59

(Thanks to Peter Gordon via the Marginal Revolution.)

Notes for today's class

Here are the notes on evaluating theories.

Here are the notes on neorealism.

For Thursday, remember to read well into the Russett and Oneal book.

Interesting Map

Here is an interesting map of the United States based on the GDP of developing countries.

Short Introduction to Political Analysis

Here's a quick outline with links that should hopefully get you up to speed for the material in this course (originally posted, 8/25/06):

Scientific Method

A. Theory

B. Hypotheses

- Independent and Dependent Variables

C. Operationalization and Measurement

D. Testing (case studies versus quantitative methods)

- Correlation (also here) and types of relationships (negative, positive, no relationship, and spurious relationship)

E. Other issues:

1.) Because we don’t always have a random sample, there will usually be a problem of selection bias

2.) Many issues we will deal with also will have complicated causal logics, even perhaps including some endogeneity

Syllabus for PSC442 International Conflict

Follow this link to a copy of the syllabus for PSC442 International Conflict.