Welcome
Notes on political science research
A Strong History
Back in grad school, we used to exchange 1- or 2-page summaries of journal articles with my peers. All of us read the articles (at least I did), but we shared the task of writing notes about them. We would collect summaries from fellow grad students at UCSD and post them to wikisum.com. You’ll find lots of summaries of classic books and articles there, although the summaries vary widely in quality depending on who wrote them.
Now that grad school’s over, we still read books and journal articles. And I still take notes on them. We post the notes here mainly for my own benefit–storing them in this format makes it easier for me to search through them. If these summaries are useful to you, great. If you’d like to discuss my reviews, please post a comment. If you’d like to start blogging here with me, please do, as long as you’re a professor or doctoral candidate in political science.
Political Reviews
Motivating Voter Turnout by Invoking the Self
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that we can dramatically boost turnout simply by reminding people to “be a voter” rather than “to vote.” When we ask people to “be a voter” and not just “to vote,” we lead them to think about...