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About

- August 22, 2023

Good Authority’s mission is to bring insights from political science to a broader audience. Here, political scientists draw on their expertise and the discipline’s research to provide in-depth analysis, illuminate the news, and inform the political conversation.

Good Authority is the successor to The Monkey Cage, a site that was founded in 2007 and published at the Washington Post from 2013-2022.

Everything we publish is freely available with no paywall or subscription fee. All pieces are under a Creative Commons license and can be copied and redistributed as long as the work is attributed to us and any changes are noted. Instructors may want to consult our teaching resources page to find explainers and more.

We encourage authenticated comments on the site as long as commenters use their actual name. We will delete comments from pseudonymous accounts as well as any offensive or abusive comments.

At this time, we are not accepting unsolicited pitches or submissions.

Publisher

John Sides is professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in public opinion, voting, and American elections. His most recent book is The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Editor-in-Chief

Kim Yi Dionne is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside. She studies African politics and public health. She is the author of Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Editors

Sarah Binder is professor of political science at George Washington University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She studies American political institutions, especially Congress. Her most recent book (co-authored with Mark Spindel) is The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press, 2017). 

Nadia Brown is professor of government at Georgetown University. She studies identity politics and legislatures, with a focus on Black women. She is co-author of Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites (Oxford University Press, 2021).  

Danny Hayes is professor of political science at George Washington University. He studies the media, gender politics, and public opinion. With Jennifer Lawless, he authored News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

Elizabeth N. Saunders is professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She studies international relations and U.S. foreign policy. She is the author of The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2024).

Erik Voeten is Peter F. Krogh Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He studies international law and institutions. He is the author of numerous articles and Ideology and International Institutions (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Jeremy Wallace is professor of government at Cornell University. His most recent book is Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology and Authoritarianism in China (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Contributors

Christopher Clary is associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, State University of New York and a nonresident fellow with the Stimson Center’s South Asia program. He is the author of The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2022). 

Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He studies trust, the politics of the Internet, and international and comparative political economy. He is co-author of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt, 2023).

Christopher Federico is professor of political science and psychology and Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. He studies political psychology, focusing in particular on the nature of ideology and belief systems, the psychological foundations of political preferences, and intergroup attitudes. He is co-author (with Christopher Johnston and Howard Lavine) of Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Danielle Gilbert is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University and a fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project. She studies political violence, international security, hostage taking, and negotiations.

Stacie E. Goddard is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Paula Phillips Bernstein ’58 Faculty Director of the Madeleine K. Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on issues of international security, especially great power competition and its effects on international institutions. Her most recent book is When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Alexandra Guisinger is associate professor of political science at Temple University. She is co-principal investigator of the Foreign Policy in a Diverse Society project, housed in Temple University’s Public Policy Lab. She studies public, market, and governmental responses to foreign economic policy, and is the author of American Opinion on Trade: Preferences without Politics (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Jason Lyall is the inaugural James Wright Chair of Transnational Studies and Associate Professor in the Government department. He also directs the Political Violence FieldLab at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. His research examines the effects and effectiveness of political violence in civil and conventional wars. He is currently writing a book on the lessons learned from the American war in Afghanistan (under contract with Princeton University Press).

Marc Lynch is professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University, where he directs the Elliott School’s Middle East Studies Program. He is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science and co-director of the Program on African Social Research. He is the co-editor of The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research After the Arab Uprisings (Oxford University Press, 2022). Marc’s Abu Aardvark blog is now published on Substack.  

Zein Murib is associate professor of political science and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. Murib’s research and teaching interests are informed by feminist and queer theory and located at the intersection of scholarship on gender and sexuality, interest groups and social movements, and marginalized political identities in U.S. politics. Murib’s first book is Terms of Exclusion: Rightful Citizenship Claims and the Construction of LGBT Political Identity (Oxford University Press, 2023). 

Ken Opalo is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He studies institutions and the political economy of development. He is the author of Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Andrew Rudalevige is Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College and (in 2023-24) a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He studies American political institutions, especially the presidency and executive branch. His most recent book is the award-winning By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Andrea Silva is associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas. Her research examines the effect of federal and state policy on questions of immigration, race, ethnicity, and political marginalization using multi-method and interdisciplinary approaches. She is the author of Direct Democracy Rules: The Effect of Propositions, Initiatives, and Referendums on State Immigration Legislation in the 21st Century (NYU Press, forthcoming).

Michael Tesler is professor of political science at UC Irvine. He is the author of Post-Racial or Most Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton University Press 2019).

Joshua Tucker is professor of politics and affiliated professor of Russian and Slavic studies and data science at New York University. He is the director of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab. He is the author of Regional Economic Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and the co-author of Communism’s Shadow (Princeton University Press, 2017). 

Kelebogile Zvobgo is assistant professor of government at William & Mary, a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, and the founder and director of the International Justice Lab. She studies human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts.

Supporters

We are grateful for the support of the Carnegie Corporation, the Democracy Fund, and Vanderbilt University.