Follow the Money Contributions to political candidates.

Show the Money Network visualization of the previous data.

Congressional Earmarks Congressional Earmarks

DEW Line’s database of PAC spending by defense contractors

Jonathan Stevenson offers a cogent summary of RAND’s golden age in today’s WSJ [1]:

During that crucial epoch, Rand helped draw a sharp distinction between first-strike and second-strike nuclear deterrence, and the dangerously offense-oriented “brinkmanship” of the 1950s gave way to the more stable defensive posture of “mutual assured destruction.”

Back then, Rand was situated exclusively in Santa Monica, Calif., far away from the churn of day-to-day government policy implementation. It had uniquely broad research and budgeting standards that freed analysts to think outside the box about strategic problems. At the same time, Rand’s official status as a federally funded research and development center afforded its employees high-level security clearances and access to classified information and government officials.

[1] Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2008, Pg. 11, “We Need A New Think Tank For The War On Terror,” By Jonathan Stevenson

On today’s WaPo op-ed page, John Kamm looks at a Pew Research Center polling data and finds a perception gap betwen how the Chinese think the world views China, and how the world actually does. Summarizing the data, Kamm concludes:

Essentially, the people of China think twice as many people in the world like their country as actually do. This isn’t a gap; it’s a chasm. And the information bubble around the Chinese people explains a lot.

A common framework used when making net assessments is to consider adversary perceptions of themselves (so called “red-red” perceptions). Applying this approach to China*, this data indicates that it may have a serious self-perception gap, which has real consequences for its behavior in the international system.

The rest of the framework involves blue-blue perceptions (What is the equivalent gap in American perceptions of its own standing in world opinion?), blue-red and red-blue perceptions. It would be a good exercise to use the open source polling data and this framework to assess the accuracy of American-Chinese perceptions.

*I am apply the framework here, not asserting that China is necessarily an adversary.