From my new essay up at Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab. To be sure, new Muslim democracies in Egypt and Tunisia face similar challenges as Indonesia did when it emerged from authoritarianism….but one major difference between Indonesia and its North African counterparts…
The Southeast Asia Research GroupDiscipline, Method, Area More exciting news for Southeast Asia in political science. I am pleased to introduce the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG), a new joint venture with Allen Hicken, Eddy Malesky, and Dan Slater that…
Lots of academic writing is bad—such is the conclusion of Stephen Walt, Dan Drezner, Jay Ulfelder, Steve Saideman, Greg Weeks, and probably 10 other poli sci bloggers whom I follow. The diagnoses are many (the logic of discovery versus the…
The disconnect between academic political science and real-world policy is a topic of some concern in current discussions of the purpose and future of political science. Dan Drezner has insisted that even the most technical political science (or narrowly for…
Chris Blattman just dropped something of a bombshell on experiments as dissertation projects: the market [for field experiments] is getting very crowded, and there are a million in the pipeline. So this is a poor product placement. The premium on…
One of the benefits of having maintained a blog for 8½ years is that people end up looking at your old posts for all sorts of random reasons. For example, in the past 24 hours, people have found this blog…
Dan Nexon does not like the interview process for research-intensive political science departments. He particularly does not like the job talk. He asks if there are viable alternatives to the modal job talk. The answer is no. Here is what…
