47
votes
What explains the durability of Arab monarchies?
Several points. Not all of them (especially the first) are equally applicable in each case. But, most of the points apply to all of them.
1. Monarchies work well when the economy is dominated by rents ...
- 88.3k
30
votes
Accepted
Is the "leftist" tendency in academia restricted to humanities?
It's surprisingly hard to find a detailed by-major breakdown of these numbers. So far, the best I can do is this study based on a “national survey of 1643 (American) faculty members from 183 four-...
- 4,885
29
votes
Accepted
Seeking a study claiming that a successful coup d’etat only requires a small percentage of the population
The source of this is Erica Chenoweth, and her value is 3.5% of the population mobilized. It was given in her TEDx talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
Transcript is on internet archive: ...
- 124k
26
votes
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
Russia's stated goal in the Ukraine saga is to stop NATO from expanding to include Ukraine. This is in turn because Western leaders apparently promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of ...
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22
votes
How can one efficiently find primary sources of propaganda in order to research it?
I find Russian propaganda by searching on YouTube for новости (Russian for news). I then sort by time. This gives the most recent Russian news in the original language, Russian. This is how I found &...
- 12.6k
19
votes
Accepted
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
Putin's important goal is to get some successes for internal Russian politics ("For one thing, Putin very much needs a distraction right now."). He needs to be seen as a hero, as someone who ...
14
votes
Accepted
Is there any study linking ignorance to political preference?
As pointed out in the comments "ignorance" is a rather broad and fuzzy term.
However, if we take it to mean the lack of formal education (more easily measured, and apparently assumed in the body of ...
14
votes
Is the "leftist" tendency in academia restricted to humanities?
(Allegedly writing from a conservative PoV) Not much detail and rather older studies, but there does seem to be a rough and ready linkage:
Surveys of professors from the early 2000s show Democrats ...
- 92.8k
12
votes
What sort of evidence exists that higher salaries for political offices attract better candidates?
It is difficult to provide exact evidence because there is hardly any agreement on what being a "better" politician means. If by "better" one means those with "higher moral ...
- 221
12
votes
How can one efficiently find primary sources of propaganda in order to research it?
I guess you mean what the Western press called the "traitors" and "scum" speech. That one was apparently on the 16th, not the 17th. Full English transcript published by the Kremlin:...
11
votes
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
There seem to be two aspects to this.
(1) On a local level, regarding the status of the primarily Russian-inhabited self-declared breakaway provinces/republics in Eastern Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign ...
- 4,584
10
votes
Does gerrymandering risk tidal wave reversal?
Yes, it definitely could happen.
The mathematical version of gerrymandering is easily expressed in integer programming, as shown here (for people who like MIPs).
In its simplest version (without ...
- 3,361
9
votes
Is the "leftist" tendency in academia restricted to humanities?
See these two studies which support your assertion.
Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty
Another study paints a similar picture
At least one other explanation for this ...
- 1,201
8
votes
Does gerrymandering risk tidal wave reversal?
It did happen. In the US in 2006, the Democrats took the House of Representatives after twelve years of Republican control. Four years later the Republicans took back the House. Both were wave ...
- 90.3k
8
votes
Voter turnout and confidence in results
A vote is not an opinion poll. Instead of extrapolating the behavior of a subset of people to everyone, it measures the behavior of all people.
The conclusion from a vote is that set out by the rules, ...
- 9,313
7
votes
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
What does Russia have to gain?
In a rather impolite statement, then-President Obama said that without Ukraine, Russia was a mere regional power. A figure of speech, but also referencing the fact that ...
- 116k
7
votes
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
There are several reason's for Russia's actions. The first: Putin's popularity. Given that Russia has been hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic and the domestic economy has stagnated throughout the last ...
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6
votes
What had the Russian government to gain from the late 2021 military build up and threatening possible invasion of Ukraine?
Testing the waters. At the US-Russian Stockholm summit at the start of the month, Secretary of State Blinken said according to Reuters:
I made very clear our deep concerns and our resolve to hold ...
JJJ♦
- 39.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Ethnicity in the USA
For academic work, the terms do have definitions - managed by the Census Bureau. They do have colloquial uses, of course, but if you're looking at quantitative data then there are definitions which ...
- 19.4k
6
votes
Ethnicity in the USA
Deciding on names of ethnic groups can be a political issue. The use of language affects the way we think, and vice versa, and so people try to affect the way we think by trying to influence how we ...
- 116k
5
votes
Is there a (reasonably) world-wide quantitative survey of malapportionment in legislative chambers?
I did find a survey published nearly 20 years ago. To begin with, the issue methodology (i.e. metric to use) is actually not entirely trivial...
How can we measure the degree of malapportionment ...
5
votes
Does gerrymandering risk tidal wave reversal?
This does not only apply to gerrymandering but any way to skew a voting system.
To see this, let’s first make a few simplifying assumptions:
We have a pure two-party system.
Votes somehow assign ...
- 1,193
5
votes
Should one use incentives when measuring voter preferences?
The purpose of the typical political "opinion poll" is different from a customer survey for market research. In an opinion poll, what you want to find out is not "how do people really ...
- 124k
5
votes
Voter turnout and confidence in results
If the election results reflect a random, unbiased sample, a 95% confidence interval would say that the measure was supported by 54.7 - 4.11 (50.59%) to 54.7 + 4.11 (58.81%) of the total population. ...
- 6,428
4
votes
To what degree do Americans think of Europe as a singular political and cultural entity?
Based on my own time spent in America and interacting with US citizens over the years, I find it's tightly related to the level of sophistication:
Very sophisticated Americans usually understand ...
- 30.7k
4
votes
How can one efficiently find primary sources of propaganda in order to research it?
If you are a journalist or a researcher intended to study propaganda, try to reach some Russian academic institutions with journalism or similar profile. Say you want to do comparative study of ...
- 23.1k
4
votes
What evidence is there to show that the UK has become more polarised in recent years?
I won't pretend to be a political scholar so I'll just quote the first couple of results that came up:
The abstract of Peret's 2021 study "A divided kingdom? Variation in polarization, sorting, ...
- 2,966
4
votes
Accepted
What are the pros and cons of ranked-choice voting compared to first-past-the-post voting?
RCV advocates are not entirely honest about failures of the Instant-Runoff (IRV) method nor that the method can be meaningfully corrected.
I had recently published a paper regarding RCV in the ...
- 2,022
4
votes
Voter turnout and confidence in results
If no one else would vote for yay: 54.7 * 16.8 = 9.19% is the minimum votes for yay.
If everyone else would vote for yay: 9.19+(100-16.8) = 92.39% is the maximum votes for yay.
That doesn't say much.
...
- 6,547
3
votes
Free websites to help me find influential or contentious local court cases?
I am looking for free websites that contain (potentially partial)
catalogs of state and local court cases in the United States.
This is a matter of public record and available from many sources.
...
- 88.3k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible