Author Archive | Guest Blogger

The recent Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme debacle highlights that social networks can impose costs. In a series of articles, the New York Times has sketched how a group of insiders, mainly wealthy Jewish families from the New York region, sought to invest in Madoff

I

Prohibition was never completely repealed

In the pre-Prohibition era, the saloons would advertise a

There is a

Thanks to Eugene Volokh for his invitation to guest blog on alcohol control policy. There

This post is not for those demented souls who think that Rod Blagojevich

Barack Obama’s promise to release a list of contacts

If my model laid out in my paper is correct, it has dramatic implications for non-partisan elections and party primaries. 1. Non-Partisan Elections Make Things Worse, Not Better One major piece of the Progressive movement

If my paper and previous posts are correct, it has some rather dramatic implications for local democracy. I

In my paper, I argue that the lack of competition in city council elections can only be explained by understanding the laws governing local elections and how they interact with voter behavior. I develop a model to explain the story. (For those of you interested in the provenance of the thinking, the model is derived […]

As I noted in my last post, there have been a few efforts to explain the lack of partisan competition in city council elections. Probably the most intuitive explanation is that, in most big cities in the country, most residents vote for Democratic candidates for President, so why shouldn

As I noted in my last post, the absence of partisan competition in city council elections in big cities at the seat-by-seat level or for control of overall local legislatures poses a substantial challenge to our understanding of what parties do. Although under-studied, people have attempted to explain why there is no such competition before. […]

My paper,

First, I want to thank Eugene and all the other Conspirators for the opportunity to post this week. It should be fun. This election year featured all sorts of historic and surprising events. One of the stranger debates, however, dealt with an election that will take place in 2009. The New York City Council debated […]