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Coalitions (Second Edition)
Halfway through my posts on the second edition of Formal Models of Domestic Politics, I am reaching the finish line for the manuscript itself. If all goes as planned, Cambridge will have the draft by next weekend. If you are reading this post, you might be reading the manuscript itself in a few weeks. Thank you in...
Electoral Competition (Second Edition)
I have been describing the changes in store for my textbook on Formal Models of Domestic Politics. Let me now turn to the three opening chapters: electoral competition under certainty, electoral competition under uncertainty, and special interest politics (the last of these substantially but not only applied models of electoral competition). The formal analysis of elections was among the first...
Regime Change (Second Edition)
In previous posts, I began to describe the changes to my textbook on Formal Models of Domestic Politics, with a second edition planned for next year. Most of those changes involve new material: additional models and exercises, a new chapter on nondemocracy. There are, however, a handful of clarifications—small edits suggested by eagle-eyed...
Veto Players (Second Edition)
In my last post, I discussed in broad terms work on a second edition of my textbook, Formal Models of Domestic Politics. Beginning with this post, I will lay out the specific changes I have made to the text. For the existing chapters, most changes fall into one of three categories: new models, new exercises (which sometimes cover new models),...
Second Edition
In my second year at Wisconsin, in the fall of 2004, I taught for the first time the second course of a new sequence in formal theory. Leaning on my own graduate training, I organized the syllabus around Persson and Tabellini’s Political Economics—the book from which I learned many models of politics. It didn’t last long. Political Economics is...
1989
November 9, the day the Berlin Wall came down. I was watching CNN with my friends in Ann Arbor. It must have been early evening, as there was live video of young people on the wall—singing, crying, drinking champagne. I remember thinking at the time that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, that I should scrape together enough...
American Values
A number of years ago, one of Russia's premier investigative journalists related to me a trick of the trade. In the run-up to publication of a big story, reporters are hidden outside of Moscow. It is the days before a paper hits the newsstands that are the most dangerous. Journalists are often killed not because they have already revealed...
Book Club
One of a series of lasts in Madison: the final meeting of the book club I co-organized with my colleague and friend Yoi Herrera. This time we read A Time of Gifts, the first book in Patrick Leigh Fermor's superlative (and incompletely finished) account of his youthful journey--- by foot, beginning in 1933---from Rotterdam to Constantinople. I love this...
History, Variously Defined
If you read my last post, you know that I've been busy moving. That, at least, is my excuse for not writing up some thoughts earlier on the first annual Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Russia, held in Madison in late May. For three days, we had economists, historians, and political scientists in town...
I’m Moving
For every one of the sixteen years I have held a Ph.D., I have been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Beginning with my seventeenth year, I will be at the University of Chicago, with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Harris School of Public Policy. It is a bittersweet moment. I...