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Is the Trump Presidency at a Tipping Point?

A friend posts the following observation on Facebook: With multiple stories breaking about Trump-Russia, we may have hit a tipping point, from which the meltdown of the 45th presidency accelerates. Part of me wants to think it's true—the sooner the presidency is transferred to competent hands, the better—and part of me is worried about the meltdown. But let's step back for a...

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...

Technology Made Us Slaves, Technology Will Set Us Free

I’m back. Vacation turned into the mad rush before the start of the semester turned into the actual start of the semester turned into…Anyway, it seems as good a time as any to return to the theme of distractions and how to manage them. My friend John Ahlquist alerts me to a piece about tech innovators going off the...

What Joe Biden Could Learn About Reform from Tsar Alexander II

Joint with Eugene (Evgeny) Finkel. Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. Climate change, racial equity, immigration, healthcare: Joe Biden has a lot on his plate beyond bringing the pandemic to an end. In possession of the narrowest of majorities in the House and a ten-seat deficit in the Senate on all business that can be filibustered,...

A Field in Search of a Name

Still catching up after a fun weekend at Harvard for a Political Institutions and Economic Policy conference. By pure coincidence, this year’s papers were all on the political economy of nineteenth-century agricultural societies: my work with Paul Dower, Evgeny Finkel, and Steve Nafziger on peasant unrest and local self-government in Imperial Russia; a paper by Bryan Leonard and Gary...

John Dingell, Heresthetician

In one of two or three previous lives, I worked on Capitol Hill in the early 1990s as a legislative assistant to the member of Congress from my home district. It was a heady experience. I had always loved politics, and while my own political views were evolving—ultimately contributing to my decision to move overseas and try something else—I...

What’s Next for the Study of Nondemocracy?

I'm back from a stimulating workshop on autocracy at Indiana University. Regina Smyth, Armando Razo, and Michael Alexeev have some exciting plans to institutionalize the study of nondemocracy at IU, and as part of the planning process they asked Konstantin (Kostya) Sonin and me to provide some perspective on the field. Armando joined us for a freewheeling discussion at...

Delegation (Second Edition)

I consider the chapter on delegation in Formal Models of Domestic Politics to be unusually coherent. This is not patting myself on the back. Rather, the literature that this chapter summarizes, with its origins in the seminal work of Holmström, is of a piece. One paper follows another; all I had to do was follow the bread crumbs. What, then,...

One Hundred Years

One hundred years since a small group of extremists seized control of a major European state, thus launching a civil war, collectivization, terror, the complete reorganization of economy and society, and a geopolitical standoff that could well have ended in human extinction—all in the name of an untested and ultimately incorrect theory of human nature. When Keynes wrote of...

What Did Stalinist Industrialization Accomplish?

Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. The spring quarter at Chicago starts in a week. I will be teaching a course on the political economy of communism and the postcommunist transition. I love this class, which I taught at Wisconsin for many years, and not just because it is an opportunity to subject a captive audience...