Lately it feels like politicians are favoring smaller groups of their constituents over the majority of them. If you've been skeptical about whether this favoritism exists, there's a new theory that supports it. Some voters who are more vocal or intense about political issues are more likely to get their local politician's attention, and these smaller groups of constituents are more likely to get what they want. In his new book, Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups o...
Dec 21, 2022•46 min•Ep. 77
Paper: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01160/109262/Cross-Country-Trends-in-Affective-Polarization?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Dec 07, 2022•45 min•Ep. 76
We took some time off to enjoy the holiday with our families, but in the wake of the 2024 mid-terms, we’re going to re-share this crucial episode and relevant episode. When it comes to polarization, most people in American politics blame the voters. But much of the political science data suggests most voters are actually moderates. So, where are all the moderate politicians? In a new book, “Who Wants To Run?: How The Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”, Stanford political scientis...
Nov 23, 2022•45 min•Ep. 75
This episode was recorded live at the NASPAA conference in Chicago. With the midterms upon us, we decided to look back at a piece of landmark scholarship that may be able to tell us something about the dynamics of personal interactions between representatives and their constituencies. It’s by political scientist Richard Fenno called “U.S. House Members in Their Constituencies: An Exploration”. We often assume that voters cast their ballots based on ideology and policy, but it could it be more pe...
Nov 09, 2022•37 min•Ep. 74
One theme on our show is trying to make sense of why elites appear to be so polarized when the larger public is more moderate. We almost always study these trends in the U.S. but could we look to another country for insight? A country like the UK perhaps? In her paper “Has The British Public Depolarized Along with Political Elites?” University of Oxford political scientist Jane Green measures the differences between elite and public polarization during the eighties and nineties when the parties ...
Oct 26, 2022•48 min•Ep. 73
There might not be a more controversial political hack than members of Congress being legally allowed to trade stocks. Infamously, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, has been regularly accused of insider trading. Recently the House of Representatives has introduced a bill that would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and children, from trading stocks. Although the bill has stalled, it's renewed a really important lingering question: are members of Co...
Oct 12, 2022•50 min•Ep. 72
For years, political scholars and pundits have claimed that primary elections are exacerbating polarization and with the 2022 midterm elections approaching this year has been no different. With many extremist candidates on both sides of the aisle, it certainly feels like this claim should be true, but does the political science back that up? To find an answer we turn to Harvard political scientist James Snyder and his 2010 paper “Primary Elections and Partisan Polarization in the U.S. Congress”....
Sep 28, 2022•49 min•Ep. 71
The COVID-19 pandemic has been an era of misinformation. From social media to cable news, the spread of false or misleading information about COVID vaccines has been rampant. Some social media platforms have moved more aggressively by trying to flag misleading posts with disclaimers. Can fact-checking reduce the spread of misinformation? And perhaps more importantly, can fact-checks change people's minds about getting vaccinated? In a new study, George Washington University political scientist E...
Sep 14, 2022•52 min•Ep. 70
In our hyper-polarized climate, it is often said that partisans determine their policy positions not based on thought and reason but on opposition to the other party. If I’m a Republican and I hear that Nancy Pelosi supports a particular policy, I’ll reflexively take the opposite stance. There is a literature in political science that suggests this is the case, but could it be wrong? In a new paper, “Updating amidst Disagreement: New Experimental Evidence on Partisan Cues”, our very own Will How...
Aug 31, 2022•47 min•Ep. 69
The midterm elections are fast approaching, and with rampant inflation one of the main concerns for Democrats is the state of the economy. It’s commonly accepted that some voters cast their ballots solely on the price of gas and bread, but does the science back that up? There is a classic paper by political scientist Gerald Kramer from 1971 that can help us answer that question. It systematically evaluates the relationship between changes in the various dimensions of the economy and two party vo...
Aug 17, 2022•42 min•Ep. 68
Something curious has happened in American politics. Andrew Yang of 2016 presidential election fame has launched a third party, The Forward Party, and he's attracting some attention. A key feature of this party is a belief in ranked choice voting and raising up the possibility that through ranked choice voting, we might recover our our democracy. We're taking a week off to spend time with family, but we wanted to resurrect our discussion with our colleague Andy Eggers, who has written at length ...
Aug 03, 2022•48 min•Ep. 67
Nearly a decade ago, the Supreme Court effectively removed the "preclearance" process in its Shelby County v. Holder decision. That process had been implemented for decades as part of the Voting Rights Act and required places with a history of racial discrimination to get approval from the Justice Department before changing their voting procedures. When the Shelby decision came down, voting rights advocates and mobilization groups panicked. There were widespread fears that this decision would dr...
Jul 20, 2022•40 min•Ep. 66
Advocates for the striking down of Roe by the Supreme Court say this will improve our politics by allowing people’s preferences to be better represented at the State level. But do State and local governments accurately match the preferences of their citizens when responding to their demands? It’s a difficult question to answer, but one paper by NYU political scientist Julia Payson and co-author Gabor Simonovits at Central European University, “Locally controlled minimum wages are no closer to pu...
Jul 06, 2022•51 min•Ep. 65
There’s long been a belief that the Supreme Court rarely departs from precedent. But as the court appears to intend to strike down Roe, we’re wondering what the data tell us about how consistent the Supreme Court has been at honoring precedent. And, is the Supreme Court more likely to depart from precedent in constitutional cases than other types? To break it all down, we spoke to Washington University law professor Lee Epstein, about her 2015 paper, "The Decision To Depart (or Not) From Constit...
Jun 22, 2022•57 min•Ep. 64
There are many questions surrounding the nature of money in politics, but one of the first order questions we should be asking is who exactly is donating that money? We now have access to more data than ever due to a dramatic increase in small donations through online fundraising platforms. Georgetown University Economist Laurent Bouton digs through this new data set in a recent paper “Small Campaign Donors” to answer all sorts of questions like: do big or small donors give more strategically, h...
Jun 08, 2022•50 min•Ep. 63
As the academic year draws to a close at The University of Chicago, our hosts are busy attending to the last minute activities of a professor. So, this week we wanted to re-share one of our favorite episodes interrogating a radically different proposal to fix the filibuster rather than abolishing it altogether. The filibuster is still one of the most contentious aspects of our politics today, and how it changes or doesn't change has a powerful impact on the most pressing political issues of the ...
May 25, 2022•47 min•Ep. 62
One of the biggest questions surrounding the conflict in Ukraine is to what extent the shadow of nuclear war affects the degree of involvement by Western countries. Much of the literature in nuclear deterrence theory assumes the incentives of mutually assured destruction are strong enough to avoid a nuclear war, and hence the existence of nuclear capabilities in Russia and the West should not play much of a role in how the conflict progresses. But one paper by a late University of California Ber...
May 11, 2022•43 min•Ep. 61
When it comes to cable news, Fox and CNN have pretty partisan viewers. So, what would happen if Fox viewers tuned into CNN for a month? Would they suddenly adopt different views more aligned with CNN? UC Berkeley political scientist David Broockman and his colleagues wanted to find out. When they paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN, they found that Fox News viewers became more supportive of vote-by-mail, and less likely to believe that then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden wanted to eliminate all p...
Apr 27, 2022•49 min•Ep. 60
By now, we've heard a lot about how state-owned Russian television is distorting the truth about the war in Ukraine. But Russian TV doesn't just reach Russian viewers. Some Ukrainians can receive its analog television signals. To understand how this propaganda influences Ukrainians, we turned to New York University political scientist Arturas Rozenas, to talk about his 2017 paper, " Electoral Effects of Biased Media: Russian Television in Ukraine "....
Apr 13, 2022•49 min•Ep. 59
We know that lobbyists have the power to influence politics. But not all lobbyists are working on behalf of corporate interest groups. Sometimes, city officials actually hire lobbyists to represent the interests of their constituents in the state legislature. Why would cities do this? This is what New York University political science professor Julia Payson explores in her paper, "The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence From State Lobbying Disclosures." She finds that local governments...
Mar 30, 2022•43 min•Ep. 58
Paper link: https://dthompson.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2021/12/Ferrer_et_al_Election_Admin.pdf
Mar 16, 2022•43 min•Ep. 57
Russia has invaded Ukraine. This horrible global crisis raises questions about Putin’s ultimate ambitions, and how nations can make credible deterrent threats in incredible circumstances. We’re not experts on the Ukraine conflict, but we can dive into the political science research to get some clarity on the underlying dynamics that may be at play. And there’s no better paper to turn to than “Fear, Appeasement, and the Effectiveness of Deterrence” from Alexander V. Hirsch at Caltech.
Mar 02, 2022•45 min•Ep. 56
You've probably heard this one before: college football games and shark attacks influence elections in favor of incumbents. Surprising findings like these are exciting, and seem to tell us a lot about the stability of our democracy and the rationality of voters. If you listen to our podcasts regularly, you’ve probably also heard this one: Anthony Fowler doesn’t think voters are irrational. On this episode, we cover a back and forth of academic papers our co-host had arguing that the original res...
Feb 16, 2022•42 min•Ep. 55
Link to paper: https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/beliefs%20qje%201%20web.pdf
Feb 02, 2022•42 min•Ep. 54
Paper: http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/famine_draft.pdf
Jan 19, 2022•47 min•Ep. 53
Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lsq.12206
Jan 05, 2022•45 min•Ep. 52
We often think of polarization as a single policy spectrum with Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. But what if this entire framework is wrong, and this error itself is worsening the divides in our country? This is what Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossman argues in his article: “Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats: The Asymmetry of American Party Politics”. He says that what really divides us isn’t differing policy views but different view...
Dec 15, 2021•47 min•Ep. 51
We took some time off to enjoy the holiday and our families. We’re going to reshare this crucial episode about how the wealthy retain power in a time of inequality this week, and we’ll be back with a brand new episode next week! Thanks for listening!
Dec 01, 2021•48 min•Ep. 50
If you watch cable news or open your twitter feed it may seem like Americans are more polarized than ever. It certainly feels like everyone is on the far ends of two diametrically opposed ideologies. But, if you look closely at the data, this current conventional wisdom may be wrong. Our very own co-host Anthony Fowler has developed a reputation on our podcast for being the champion of the idea that most voters are actually moderates. On this episode, he puts his data where his mouth is, and sha...
Nov 17, 2021•43 min•Ep. 49
There’s a long tradition in political science of using voter rationality to test the health of our democracy. But could this myopia be misguided? Are there any situations where irrational and uninformed voters could actually generate a healthier democracy? That’s exactly what University of Chicago political scientist Ethan BdM examines in his paper “Is Voter Competence Good for Voters?: Information, Rationality, and Democratic Performance”. Using formal models, he lays out the possibility that i...
Nov 03, 2021•47 min•Ep. 48
