In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.

Abstract:In the United States, voters directly elect dozens of politicians: Presidents, governors, legislators, mayors, and so on. How do voters decide which politician to blame for which policy outcomes? Previous research on gubernatorial approval has suggested that voters divide policy blame between governors and the president based on each office's "functional responsibilities"-requiring that responsibilities are clearcut, which is seldom true. Using data from four surveys, I show that voters actually divide responsibility for economic conditions in a partisan manner, preferring to blame officials from the opposing party when problems arise. However, this sort of argument fails to account for the powerful and well-documented role that partisanship plays in structuring American voters' behavior. My argument, detailed below, is that Americans rely heavily on partisan shortcuts when deciding whether to hold their governor (as opposed to the president) responsible for state-level policy outcomes-especially when functional responsibility for a particular policy area is shared by both the governor and the president. Of course, it's far from novel to suggest that partisanship matters in American politics; previous research has shown abundantly that voters tend to have more patience with politicians of their own party than with politicians from the other side. My major claim is not just that partisanship matters, then, but rather that partisanship helps determine which policy results get attributed to the governor and which get attributed to the president. Previous work on gubernatorial elections has erred by emphasizing functional responsibility without also taking account of partisanship.To be clear, I do not intend to argue that voters will completely ignore the president's and governor's actual functional responsibilities; even the least engaged citizen should know that governors have as little control over foreign policy as presidents have over potholes. Rather, my argument is that partisan considerations will influence allocations of blame in the many policy areas where the president and the governor share responsibility-an argument I test by analyzing responsibility for the state's economy. When the president and the governor belong to the same party, there is not much opportunity for a partisan blame game to develop between them. But when they belong to different parties, a situation I refer to as "divided federalism," partisan voters gain the opportunity to blame one for economic problems while giving the other a free pass. Just as divided government creates a potential blame game between the president and Congress, divided federalism creates a similar situation between the president and the governors. I proceed now by briefly reviewing the two main literatures I draw on-the literatures on partisan bias and on gubernatorial elections-and show how the latter can benefit by incorporating insights from the former. I then explore three specific empirical implications of this theoretical argument.

The rapid rise of Twitter and other social media tools has enticed many members of Congress to personally use these services. Such waves of technological adoption are comparatively rare in Congressional history, leaving us with little knowledge about why some members of Congress adopt new technologies while others do not. We find that Twitter adoption and use are relatively difficult to predict. Members are more likely to use Twitter if they belong to the minority party, if their party leaders urge them to, if they are young, or if they serve in the Senate. Surprisingly, we find that electoral vulnerability has little or no effect on Twitter adoption or use.

In this article, we analyze a unique set of state-level monthly survey data covering the eighteen months preceding the 2006 election to estimate (1) the relative effects of national and local conditions on the strength of challenges to incumbent senators and governors and (2) the effects of these challenges on incumbent popularity and, ultimately, vote shares. The analysis confirms several of the basic components of the theory that the strategic behavior of candidates and campaign contributors amplifies the effects of local and national conditions on election results, thereby enhancing electoral accountability. But it also uncovers a striking difference between the two offices. Even taking the strongly pro-Democratic national climate into account, the election context had a strong tendency to reduce the approval ratings of Senators, while it had an equally strong tendency to increase the approval ratings of governors. We speculate as to what might account for this difference.

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