In this previous post I talked about the Whigs and Democrats policy stances in the early 19th century. I showed that these two parties differed on a wide range of issues. Now I hope to describe their coalitions of support and show how they were linked to the policy views. In other words who supporte...

Because it’s not like the rest of politics stops so that Europe can reach a consensus on the economic crisis. President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help ...

Over the next three days, a high level delegation of U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani officials will meet to “seriously deal with the hard issues: how do the Afghans want to deal with [the insurgent activity on] their border, how to do this better, how to undermine those insurgents that run across ...

The Odyssey Expedition - 365-Days-Journey Round The World -Graham David Hughes THE ODYSSEY is an attempt to step foot in every nation on Earth in 365 days by a guy named Graham David Hughes. Travelling round the world within exactly a year is hard work and the race against time can put each one unde...

Vilno in the comments thread has called attention to this excellent article on the invaluable Fruits and Votes website. It discusses First Past the Post (FPTP-ie if say the basic Israeli administration districts (shown in the map above) or more likely much smaller sub divisions became constituencies...

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } This is a fantastic and powerful work of political science edited Andrew Gelman (with many contributors but I will refer to " Gelman " for convenience rather than to slight his colleagues) Gelman has also (with some of these colleagues) set up an excellent blog that de...

One last thing Fry is highly sceptical of is the notion of a southern Marital tradition. Building on a growing and powerful secondary literature he shows that in fact at certain times the south has actually been underrepresented (for example in the military post war and with World War 1 Volunteers )...

To return briefly to the subject of Israeli elections I thought i'd provide a number of links. I would like to emphaise i'm linking because I find the articles interesting (particularly in the political analysis/ reportage)-not because I necessarily agree with them at all-as one can see from the deg...

I'd now like to examine some ways I disagree with Professor Fry on in terms of the era of the two World Wars. In this era the South has generally been seen as a stronghold of internationalism Fry brings powerful ammunition to bear on this concept-but i think takes it too far. Firstly he see's the sw...

They had the Israeli elections today and the result appears to be a near-dead-heat between Likud and Kadima; early results have Kadima with a 23-22% lead. Here's the BBC tag-team live-blog of the results. As expected, Labor got knocked into fourth by hawkish Russian-centric Yisrael Beiteinu; YB ...