As I was re-reading all blog posts I realized that my blog posts became more analytical and less expository as the weeks progressed. At the beginning of the semester my blog posts were a few statement sentences and then followed by a plethora of my unorganized thoughts in question format. Not my strongest pieces of writing. But as the course progressed my blog posts (for democracy in the news and elective posts) began to incorporate course readings and materials and became more analytical–and thus stronger pieces of writing. I was able to pull in variables and indicators from certain datasets and hypothesize based on certain variables and indicators if Egpyt could be still deemed a democracy or more a semi-democratic government. I find that my blog post for assignment 11 ‘polish a post’ is my best piece of writing as after being given the opportunity to re-write it it became more analytical and scholarly. However, if we are going on popularity my blog post on celebrity marriage statistics got the most comments and feedback which might make it the most memorable.  

I was gonna read through other classmates blogs that I had commented on to see which ones I even found worthy of commenting on to figure out which one is most memorable. But the first blog post that came to mind was @Dominik’s ‘joke’ blog post on how different countries and regime types would distribute or treat two cows. I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard at a political joke in my life and therefore Dominik’s blog post deserves to be the most memorable. It is a satirical but well supported statements of how economics, countries and regime types value goods and how they distribute goods among citizens. I recommend you all go read it.

As of right now I have successfully read all the articles associated with the Democracy and Welfare readings and constructed an outline detailing my argument. One of the articles states that Polity may not be best to operationalize certain measures due to endogeniety problems. I found this interesting as the first three articles that were on the class reading list all used Polity to regress stats on spending. So then this got me thinking is there a right way or just a best way to operationalize things such as satisfaction, subjective well-being and contentment with government quality. Are the articles that try to operationalize these last three things weaker than articles that measure more solid concepts such as education spending and infant mortality rates. And does this mean we can never quite understand the impact that democracy has on happiness? These are things that I will discuss in greater detail in my paper.