Welcome to Good Authority! We are excited to launch this new site. Its mission is simple: to bring insights from political science to a broader audience. We have assembled a great group of political scientists who will 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 about politics and political science that was founded in 2007. Most recently, it was published at The Washington Post from 2013-22. The spirit of TMC will carry on here.
We are also doing a few things differently. For one, all of our content will be freely available (no paywall!) and published under a Creative Commons license, including the content originally published at the Washington Post. This means that it can be republished anywhere, as long as it is attributed to Good Authority and the original author(s). We hope this will be helpful to contributors and readers who may want to use this content on their own websites, in reading compilations, or anything else.
Second, we are going to rely on a group of regular contributors rather than accept unsolicited pitches or submissions as we did at TMC. This reflects the demands of launching and running an independent site.
Third, we are going to be branching out from the format that we generally used at the Washington Post. We’ll have pieces of varied lengths, including some bloggier content that resembles the original TMC. We’ll have more audio-visual content as well. One new feature will be “A Good Read,” an audio version of a recently published post that can be accessed through our site’s podcast feed every week.
Finally, we will have authenticated comments on the pieces we publish. Our goal is to encourage intelligent conversation while limiting the trolling and other nonsense that flourishes when people can be anonymous.
Down the road, we anticipate some new features and initiatives. For example, we will build on our earlier efforts at TMC to recruit and train a diverse cadre of early-career political scientists in public engagement through the Good Authority Fellows program that will launch in 2024. We also plan to publish a column devoted to election reports, publishing analysis of recent elections by country experts.
Of course, some things are going to stay the same. We will continue to publish our weekly newsletter, which will provide a round-up of recently published posts (sign up here). We will continue to have a “song of the week.” And links to new research. And plenty of graphs.
Thank you for reading and for your support.
Image: Photo in image courtesy of © janniswerner via Canva.com