Not Another Politics Podcast

We often say on this podcast that the American electorate is not polarized but the elites are, and that this polarization causes policy gridlock. But what if it’s the other way around? Is it possible that gridlock in government is actually causing polarization and a turn toward extremist candidates?

That’s the assertion of a paper called “From Gridlock to Polarization” by Barton Lee, the Chair of Political Economy and eDemocracy at ETH Zurich. Lee uses a large-scale online experiment to show how voters become more willing to vote for extremist candidates. It leads to some fascinating implications for how we should think about the consequences of ineffective government.

Paper link:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4521276

When political commentators talk about polarization, they often mean a partisan ideological divide: the left vs the right, republicans vs democrats, progressives vs conservatives. But what if there is a different dichotomy driving our political disagreements that is orthogonal to ideological differences?

That’s what University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski argues in a recent paper, “American Politics in Two Dimensions: Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations. Using two national surveys from 2019 and 2020, he shows that anti-establishment and anti-elite sentiments may be more of a driving force in our politics than partisan ideology.

Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajps.12616

If there is one thing the right and left seem to agree on it’s that money distorts our politics. It allows the rich to shape policy, choose who gets elected, and escape consequences. But what if this common belief isn’t as true as you think?

On our second live episode, we look back to famous paper in the political science literature, “Why Is There so Little Money in U.S. Politics?” by Stephen Ansolabehere, John Figueiredo and James Snyder. Their provocative paper asks an often-overlooked question: if political money is so effective, why isn’t there more of it?

This episode was recorded live at the University of Chicago Podcast Network Festival.

One of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promises is to upend the modern civil service through an executive order called “Schedule F”. Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over this administrative state since its conception, but why is this area of government so divisive and what power does it really hold?

The history of the civil services’ origins is one that holds many lessons about the rise of presidential power, the fall of the party system, and the polarization of politics. And there is no better expert on these topics than University of Virginia political scientist, Sidney Milkis. His 1993 book “The President and the Parties” is one of those books that seems to always be relevant but, with increased conservative focus on the administrative state, it is especially worth revisiting today.

It’s one of the most common refrains in political discourse today: social media is the source of polarization. It’s a difficult proposition to empirically study because companies like Meta and X don’t share their data publicly. Until now.

In a landmark series of papers, three in Science and one in Nature, Princeton political scientists Andy Guess and a massive team of researchers were given unique access by Meta to study how the platform and algorithms affected users’ attitudes and behaviors during the 2020 election. The findings are surprising and fascinating, even as the project itself raises intriguing questions about how to conduct research on a company in partnership with that very same company.

There is no political topic that can get people’s blood boiling quite like partisan gerrymandering. Many even go so far as to call it an afront to our democracy. But what do we know about how effective it is and what the data shows about its outcomes?

In a new paper, “Widespread Partisan Gerrymandering Mostly Cancels Nationally, But Reduces Electoral Competition” Princeton political scientist, Kosuke Imai, uses a novel methodological approach to try and document the effect of partisan gerrymandering. What he finds is surprising and may lead people who participate in it to re-think whether it’s worth the effort.

Link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217322120

The assumption in political science has always been that electing challengers can lead to a downturn in performance. It takes time to do all the hiring involved in establishing a new government, and there is always a learning curve about processes and procedures. But a surprising new paper shows the opposite might be true.

In “Electoral Turnovers”, Boston University economist Benjamin Marx uses a vast new data set to show that ousting the incumbent always seems to lead to improved performance, especially economic performance.

Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4039485

The common refrain in political coverage today says that each side of the aisle is living in an information bubble. There is a partisan knowledge gap between the facts Democrats know and the facts Republicans know. May believe this gap could be the downfall of our democracy. But what if that gap isn’t as large as we think?

In a new paper by independent researcher, Gaurav Sood, titled “A Gap In Our Understanding? Reconsidering the Evidence for Partisan Knowledge Gaps” he finds that the way we study knowledge gaps is flawed, and that differences in factual knowledge may not be as high as supposed.

Paper Link: https://www.gsood.com/research/papers/partisan_gap.pdf

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?

We’re taking a short summer break to catch up on some incredible episodes we have in the works. But in the meantime, we’re going to re-share some of our prior conversations that we think are the most vital and fascinating. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you soon with new episodes of Not Another Politics Podcast.

Partisan misinformation. Many people think it comes from the news people watch. 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?

We’re taking a short summer break to catch up on some incredible episodes we have in the works. But in the meantime, we’re going to re-share some of our prior conversations that we think are the most vital and fascinating. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you soon with new episodes of Not Another Politics Podcast.

As the Supreme Court debates whether to end affirmative action, concerns about the power of implicit racial bias to shape who gets ahead in America are as salient as ever. But what do we know about the extent and power of this racism to drive voting decisions? Is there a scientific way to measure it?

In a new paper “Disfavor or Favor? Assessing the Valence of White Americans’ Racial Attitudes” political scientist Tim Ryan provides a new framework for how perceived racial attitudes line up with voting. It takes on the faults of our existing racial bias literature and provides striking evidence about how to characterize white American’s racial attitudes. 

Ryan is a professor at The University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill. You can find the paper at this link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3701331 

We’ve become deeply familiar with stimulus checks in the last few years, but what isn’t clear is what affect these transfers may have on elections. Could stimulus checks be enough for citizens to change their votes to the party handing out the money and if so, is this a way for politicians to buy votes?

Northwestern Professor of economics Silvia Vannutelli explores these questions in a paper titled “The Political Economy of Stimulus Transfers”. She looks at stimulus payments in Italy in 2014 and uncovers some surprising findings. Not only did these transfers appear to “purchase” some votes, but the effect seem to persist into the future.

We all know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but if we’re being honest we all do it on occasion anyway. Could it be that we also elect our politicians just based on how they look? Of course, there’s the old idea of looking “presidential”, but how much power does that really have to sway an election?

A famous paper by University of Chicago behavioral scientist Alexander Todorov provides us with some surprising insights. Just by flashing two faces of competing politicians for mere seconds, participants were able to accurately judge the outcomes of elections based on how competent they thought the politicians looked. It’s a curious finding that raises more questions than it answers, and we dig into both on this episode.  

When citizens directly appeal to their government, are their concerns ignored or taken seriously? It’s an important question for understanding norms around accountability, especially in authoritarian regimes. 

To find some answers, University of Chicago Professor of Public Policy Shaoda Wang helped develop a clever field experiment evaluating how Chinese regulators respond to citizen appeals about companies violating pollution standards. 

The experiment is fascinating on its own, but it also provides a wealth of data about the effectiveness of citizen appeals, how corporations respond when complaints are public or private, and even the incentives companies follow when it comes to adhering to pollution standards. 

Why is populism on the rise across the globe? One story says this movement is driven by anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment, that they just want to throw the bums out. Another says it’s driven by identity politics, an anti-immigrant pro-nativist ideology. Both stories don’t leave room for much hope. But what if there was another story that not only gives us some hope but supplies a clear solution.

A new paper by economist Giacomo Ponzetto from the Barcelona School of Economics provides us just that story. It’s called “Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Municipalities”, and it looks at home simply increasing the effectiveness of local government may decrease support for populist candidates.

Paper link: https://bse.eu/research/working-papers/do-incompetent-politicians-breed-populist-voters-evidence-italian

In the runup to the 2020 election, the academic journal Nature made the unprecedented decision to endorse Joe Biden for President. During an era when trust in science has never seemed more crucial, this decision led many to wonder if explicitly political statements increase or decrease public trust in science.

Luckily, one PhD graduate from the Stanford School of Business designed a well-crafted experiment to find an answer. Using the Nature endorsement as a test case, Floyd Zhang wrote a paper that helps us explore the effects of public trust when scientific journals make endorsements.

Paper link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273001

Paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1952717

Paper link: https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlpip/113.00000063.html 

The popular narrative these days is that democracies around the globe are backsliding. If we turn to countries like Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela, this threat certainly is true — authoritarian dictators have contributed to democratic decline. But what does the global picture reveal? Does the claim hold true? A new paper by Anne Meng and Andrew Little investigates this question, by analyzing more objective indicators such as incumbent performance in elections.

Anne Meng is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Link to paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4327307 

On this show, we focus a lot on ideological polarization but it’s important to remember that politics is about more than ideology or even policy victories. It’s about distribution and redistribution of goods and services in return for party support, votes. This view of politics is called clientelism, and it often goes overlooked.

One of the landmark papers on clientelism is from Tariq Thatchil, a political scientist at The University of Pennsylvania. It won the award for best paper in the APSR in 2018, and it’s called “How Clients Select Brokers, Competition and Choice in India’s Slums”. Their investigation prompts a re-thinking of the dynamics of clientelism and perhaps even holds some lessons for how to re-think the ideological view of politics as well.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5310a4d8e4b05a56d51f81c8/t/5b4cbc711ae6cf1a9051724e/1531755638231/Auerbach_Thachil_APSR.pdf

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 of Voters to Get What They Want, University of San Diego political scientist Seth J. Hill uses new empirical evidence to tackle a question that has been floating on the radar: Is democracy broken or are politicians becoming more undemocratic with their approach to win votes?

Paper: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01160/109262/Cross-Country-Trends-in-Affective-Polarization?redirectedFrom=fulltext

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".

Paper link: https://dthompson.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2021/12/Ferrer_et_al_Election_Admin.pdf 

Link to paper: https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/beliefs%20qje%201%20web.pdf

Paper: http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/famine_draft.pdf

Paper link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lsq.12206

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 information and rationality do not always lead to a better democracy and strikes directly at the heart of this foundational literature.

Paper link: http://home.uchicago.edu/bdm/PDF/voter_competence.pdf

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 scientist Andrew Hall argues that the reason we don’t have more moderate politicians is actually quite simple…there just aren’t any incentives for them to run.

Link to book: Who Wants To Run?: How The Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization

In 1964, political scientist Philip Converse published one of the most citied papers in the discipline: “The nature of belief systems in mass publics”. It attempted to define just how consistent and sophisticated are the political beliefs of the American public.

In our current moment, when democracy seems in the balance of an ideologically polarized society, it’s hard to think of paper with more relevance. But how accurate is it, and how has the paper itself pushed political science, creating a feedback loop, to focus on particular questions instead of others?

The podcast is going to try something different this week. We’re going to look back at this foundational paper, discuss its implications for today, and investigate how it has shaped political science.

Paper Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650 

There’s a long standing debate in political science about the problem of strategic voting: when voters cast their ballots not in line with their true preferences, but for the candidate they hate the least whom they think is also most likely to win.

In a new paper, University of Chicago political scientist Andrew Eggers shows that a completely different system, ranked-choice voting, could reduce strategic voting and create opportunities for people to vote in line with their true preferences.

Paper link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2komhumusf8yfr2/strategic_voting_in_AV_v29.pdf?dl=0 

You’ve probably seen a lot of surveys recently about how many Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, or that they support the January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill, or that they don’t trust the vaccine. Do these responses predict their behavior in the real world? Or are they just partisan cheerleading?

Northwestern Political Scientist Mary McGrath looks into this question in her paper “Economic Behavior and The Partisan Perceptual Screen.” By combing through data about survey responses and spending patterns before and after presidential elections, she investigates whether partisans truly believe it when they say the economy is getting better when one of their own occupies the White House. If partisans do believe what they say, shouldn’t their financial decisions change accordingly? And if these decisions don’t change, what does that mean for how we should think about survey responses in general?

Paper Link: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/b/3288/files/2019/10/2017-McGrath-Partisan-Screen.pdf  

Whether it’s trying to convince you to vote for a particular candidate or get vaccinated, the identity of the person who knocks on your door may matter. So who are the people who volunteer to do this canvassing? Are they likely to succeed?

These are all questions that Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos investigates in his paper, “Party Activists As Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign As A Principal-Agent Problem.” Using a rare dataset from Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, Enos delves into the politics of door to door campaigns, and we try and tease out some lessons for our current efforts to persuade people to get vaccinated.

Link To Paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/enoshershpa.pdf

Infrastructure. It’s one of the hottest topics in politics today. But what does the research say about the effects and politics of infrastructure investment?

Political scientist, Jon Rogowski, from the University of Chicago has a surprising paper that shows the long-term economic outcomes of post office developments in the United States. But it also gives us a lot to think about when it comes to who benefits, misses out, or even loses when infrastructure gets political.

Paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rogowski/files/post_office_development_ajps_final.pdf 

It seems like extremists politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene receive a disproportionate amount of attention and money. This has led many political actors to believe that extremism is good politics. There’s even some scientific research to back up that claim.

But a new paper by Professor of Politics at Princeton, Brandice Canes-Wrone, shows the exact opposite. It shows that, in fact, moderates may have better chances of getting elected than extremists. So, should more politicians take a moderate approach?

The debate about abolishing the filibuster isn’t going anywhere. Proponents say it forces compromise and consensus, while detractors claim it leads to gridlock and minority rule. But is there a third option?  

Harvard scholar, Kenneth Shepsle, has a radically different proposal that addresses all these concerns without abolishing the filibuster altogether. We discuss his idea on this episode.

A lot of people are unhappy with the ideological make-up of the Supreme Court. They say it doesn’t reflect the majority of the country. President Biden’s commission tasked with reforming the Supreme Court started meeting for the first time in May of this year. One of the proposals they’re going to consider is setting term limits on Justices. But they’re far from the first group to consider this idea.

Adam Chilton is a Professor of Law at The University of Chicago Law School and the author of a paper the proposes a set of Supreme Court reforms involving terms limits, and then runs simulations to show how the make-up of the Court could have been different if their reforms were in place. If we had term limits from the beginning, could we have avoided the problems people have with the Court?

We’ve been doing this podcast for over a year and we’ve covered a lot of research, but each paper is far from the final word on any topic.

On this episode, it’s time to do some updating. We’re going to take three recent papers and show how they change or deepen our understanding of prior papers we’ve covered on this podcast.  

Does the ability for minority parties to delay and obstruct legislation force the majority party to only pass bills that are more moderate? It’s a question that informs much of our political debate around dilatory tactics like the filibuster.

University of Michigan Political Scientist, Christian Fong, has a paper that models this question and argues that these delay and obstruct abiliities lead to policies that are closer to what the median voter may want. We discuss that paper, the filibuster and the possible strategies of Sen. Joe Manchin on this episode.

There’s a lot of debate in our politics about whether we should have stricter voter ID laws. But both sides are having an argument based almost entirely on assumptions because data on the real effect of these laws are scarce. Not anymore.

In a brand new paper, Stanford Political Scientist Justin Grimmer gives us a fresh look at whether stricter voter ID laws decrease turnout during elections. The numbers may surprise you.

This year the U.S. will go through its decennial redistricting process, which is resurfacing our national conversation around gerrymandering. But Stanford Professor of Political Science, Jonathan Rodden, says gerrymandering isn't the least of our problems when it comes to the politics of geography.

In his book, "Why Cities Lose", Rodden illustrates how we can still end up with minority majority rule, regardless of gerrymandering, due to the urban-rural divide. So, if the Democrats want to win more legislative seats, should they move to the suburbs?

Are land-use regulations incredibly boring? Not quite. As our guest argues, these seemingly banal policies could be causing modern-day segregation.

In a new paper, Jessica Trounstine, chair of the political science department a the University of California Merced, makes a strong case for why land-use policies aren’t as race-neutral as they seem, and why we need to pay more attention to them.

We’re constantly told that we’re trapped in media “echo chambers”, that our media diets mirror our political leanings. But what do the data say? Is it possible that a majority of us have a much more moderate media diet than we assume?

A new paper by Andrew Guess, Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton, provides a completely unique data set that complicates our assumptions about America’s “echo chambers” and media diets.

Paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rjsnp8k3im7377/AGuess_OMD_AJPS.pdf?dl=0

    When was the last time you voted split-ticket in an election? It may not be surprising to hear that our elections have become increasingly nationalized in the last few decades. Most people vote for a single party straight down the ballot. The question is, why?     Daniel Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Harris School of Public Policy, says the answer may be the massive reduction of local news. On this episode, we speak with Moskowitz about why nationalized elections are a problem, the key role of local news, and what we might do to fix things.   Paper: <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/local-news-information-and-the-nationalization-of-us-elections/4AEEA64CB7EC2CF384434AB0482E63F4"> https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/local-news-information-and-the-nationalization-of-us-elections/4AEEA64CB7EC2CF384434AB0482E63F4</a>         

Political scandal is a historically defining aspect of American politics. But, there’s been very little scholarship on the political incentives that surround the production and consequences of scandals.

In a recent paper, “Political Scandal: A Theory”, our very own Will Howell and Wioletta Dziuda create a new model of political scandal that makes these incentives clear. On this episode, we discuss how these incentives should reshape the way we think about political scandals.

One of the defining discussions of the Trump presidency centers on the fate of our democracy. In the aftermath of his populist presidency, and as we transition to the Biden era, we’re wondering whether the future is bright or dim.

There’s no better scholar to put this question to than the University of Chicago Professor and co-author of “Why Nations Fail”, James Robinson. We look forward and backward with Robinson to diagnose the health of our democracy.

It’s an extraordinarily distressing time for democracy in America. The storming of the Capitol and the votes by some Republican elected officials questioning the results of the 2020 election have many asking what force could act as a check on these increasing anti-democratic tendencies in American political life?  

A paper from Milan Svolik, Prof. of Political Science at Yale, may hold some answers. He investigates whether the American public would act as a check on anti-democratic politicians, and reveals how much we truly value democracy when we’re presented with tradeoffs.

It’s been an incredibly divisive year, and we’re constantly told we’re more politically divided than ever. But, as our team takes some time with their families for the holidays, we want to re-share a more hopeful conversation with you that sheds some new light on these seemingly unbridgeable divides in our country.

We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be bringing you brand new episodes after the holiday.

It’s long been thought in political science that giving people resources through government programs will get them more involved in politics. But this has always been a difficult question to answer in a controlled environment. That is until the 2008 Medicaid expansion in Oregon.

There was an extensive research initiative done on the roll out of that expansion, and our boss and the Dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, Katherine Baicker, was involved. On this episode, we parse through the results with her to see if we can get a new perspective on this question.

This week, we took some time off for Thanksgiving so we're going to feature another University of Chicago Podcast Network show. It’s called Big Brains. On this episode, they spoke with Professor James Robinson, author of the renowned book Why Nations Fail, about his groundbreaking theories on why certain nations succeed and others fail as well as the future of America’s institutions. We hope you enjoy and we’ll see you soon for a new episode of Not Another Politics Podcast.

Most of America, and a lot of the world, has been singularly focused on the U.S. presidential election. With so much media attention on this one event, could foreign actors be taking advantage of this moment to do unpopular things?

In a new paper, economist Ruben Durante from the University of Pompeu Fabra argues that politicians strategically time controversial actions with major news events, when the United States is most distracted.

Last week, the American people elected Joe Biden to be the forty-sixth president of the United States. This was an incredibly contentious and complex election. We decided to get together to try and make sense of what just happened.

On this episode, we discuss what message the historic turn out, for both candidates, sends about Trumpism and the increasing left-wing of the Democratic party, why the polls got everything so wrong, again, and what a Biden Presidency will look like given the likelihood of a divided government.

The appointment of Amy Coney Barrett would make the Supreme Court more conservative than it has been in decades. Importantly, it also would be more conservative than the majority of the public. But one piece of political science research suggests that an out-of-step Court will not simply have its way in the years ahead.

Judges like to present themselves as arbiters of the law, free from the entanglements of politics. But work from Tom Clark, Professor of Political Science at Emory University, calls that idea into question, and shows why our new conservative Court may still follow public opinion.

On this second edition of the "Just Another Politics Podcast Special", we decide to join our fellow political podcasts in sitting back in our armchairs and sharing our thoughts on the first Presidential debate.

The day after the Vice Presidential debate, we recorded a response to what happened and what we think its affect on the 2020 election could be. We think this insightful conversation is worth sharing with you, even if it breaks our usual format.

Don't worry, we'll be back next episode with serious-minded research and science that looks at our politics and political system!

On this "Just Another Politics Podcast Special", we decide to join our fellow political podcasts in sitting back in our armchairs and sharing our thoughts on the first Presidential debate.

The day after the debate, we recorded a response to what happened and what we think its affect on the 2020 election could be. We think this insightful conversation is worth sharing with you, even if it breaks our usual format.

Don't worry, we'll be back next episode with serious-minded research and science that looks at our politics and political system!

Every Presidential election, we talk about “getting out the vote”. But what really works and what doesn’t in terms of getting people to go to the polls? And how will the coronavirus pandemic alter those efforts? We speak to one political scientist who has conducted more studies into “get out the vote” campaigns than any other.

Professor Donald Green from Columbia University shares his research about what works in terms of getting out the vote, and how we expect things to be different this years due to COVID-19.

We’re heading into the homestretch of the 2020 election and, as October draws near, we want to take a research focused look at the famed “October Surprise.” It’s a political notion that says, if you want to damage a presidential candidate with a political bombshell you’ve discovered, you should wait until just before the election to release the accusations. But why should candidates wait? What do October Surprises reveal about the politics of scandal? And what can voters can infer from them?

A paper by Gabriele Gratton, a professor at The University of New South Wales in Australia, gives counter intuitive insights into when you should drop a bombshell if you want to cause the maximum amount of damage to your political opponent. We discuss how this research could change the way we view “October surprises” and the 2020 election.

Link to paper: http://www.restud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MS23024manuscript.pdf 

In November, Kamala Harris could be elected the first woman to ever serve as president or vice president. Why are women so underrepresented in the highest levels of government? And what does this imply about the women who do reach those levels? 

In this episode, we discuss a paper from Professors Christopher Berry at the University of Chicago and Sarah Anzia at UC Berkeley that attempts to indirectly assess discrimination against women in the electoral process by testing whether the women who are elected perform better once in office. 

We discuss their study, alternative explanations of their findings, and implications for the 2020 presidential election and a potential Biden-Harris administration.

Link to paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00512.x

How is it that in a Democracy with massive inequality, where the poor have just as much voting power as the rich, do the wealthy continue to get what they want politically? It’s a question that’s troubled political thinkers for a long time.    Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have an answer in their new book “Let Them Eat Tweets: How The Right Rules In An Age of Extreme Inequality”. On this episode, we tackle that question and their answer.   Part 1: How did the plutocrats take over the Republican Party: 16:00   Part 2: Are the voters getting duped or do their preferences really align with the wealthy: 20:20   Part 3: Is Donald Trump a natural continuation of Republican strategy?: 34:20

Who shows up to vote in America, and why do they do it? These are two of the most debated and contentious questions in political science. After almost every election, you’ll hear experts and pundits lamenting the lack of voter turnout. But does the research have anything to say about what policies would increase representation?

In this episode, our very own Anthony Fowler explains a new report that he co-authored in Brookings that argues we will get better representation but instituting compulsory voting in the U.S. But in a country where we can’t even get everyone to wear a mask, what are the odds that compulsory voting would work here, and what would it’s benefits be?

The dramatic rise of populism in America, embodied in President Trump, presents a real threat to democracy. Our very own professor William Howell argues that the root of the problem lies with ineffective government and that the solution may be to give the President agenda setting power.

We delve into his new book “Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy” and explore how giving president’s agenda setting power could break government gridlock and lead us to a more effective government.

One of the most anticipated developments of the 2020 election is who Democratic Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will pick to be his running mate. One thing is almost certain though, whoever he picks will be a women. And that person very well could be the first female President of the United States.

Does the political science scholarship tell us anything about how a woman executive may govern differently? One intriguing paper, "Queens", from Oeindrila Dube at The University of Chicago sheds some revelatory light on this question.

Paper: http://odube.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Dube_Harish_Queens_Paper.pdf 

In the last few weeks, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and many other black people at the hands of police have driven nationwide protests. To be true to the mission of our show, we want to look at this complex moment through the lens of political science research.

There’s almost no paper getting more attention at this moment than Princeton Assistant Professor Omar Wasow’s “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”. We decided to devote this entire episode to our interview with Omar during which we discuss the substance of the paper, what it can and can’t say about our current moment, and the controversies that have surrounded it.

Paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/agenda-seeding-how-1960s-black-protests-moved-elites-public-opinion-and-voting/136610C8C040C3D92F041BB2EFC3034C 

One cause for concern during a pandemic that hasn’t gotten much attention is what else politicians might be doing while we’re focused on the virus. What laws are they passing, what regulations are they getting rid of, and could their actions be more in line with their donors than their voters?

Professor Jorg Spenkuch from Northwestern University has a fascinating paper that provides insight into these important questions. The data he provides point in the direction that political accountability takes a big hit during disasters.

Paper: Natural Disasters, Moral Hazard, and Special Interests In Congress

It may be hard to believe during coronavirus, but the 2020 election will soon be upon us. As usual, news outlets will play a crucial role informing the public about the candidates. But could their decisions actual swing elections?

That’s the argument put forward by Prof. Gregory Martin from Stanford University in a recent paper. The data he’s collected shows that the decisions made by reporters and editors may have surprising effects on who voters support.

Paper: https://web.stanford.edu/~gjmartin/papers/Milestones%20Jan%202020.pdf 

One of the increasingly prominent concerns around the coronavirus is how we’ll handle voting in the 2020 election. Democrats have called for a blanket vote-by-mail system, while Trump and the Republicans have said that system would disproportionately favor Democrats. But what does the research and data tell us about vote by mail systems?

A recent paper from soon to be Asst. Prof at UCLA, Dan Thompson, provides us with the newest and cleanest data available about the effects of vote-by-mail on turn out and partisans differences in elections. The results are surprising, and should completely change the debate over vote-by-mail.

Link to paper: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/20-015.pdf

One of the prominent stories of the coronavirus outbreak has been that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a shared set of facts about the virus. One believes it is more deadly and dangerous than the other. But groundbreaking research from political scientist Gregory Huber at Yale University call that narrative into question.

For years, political scientists have relied on surveys to understand what the American public knows and thinks about what’s happening in politics and the world, like COVID-19 for example. But what if those surveys aren’t actually telling us about people’s true beliefs?

Americans often think of demagogues as a feature of foreign countries with weak or non-existent democracies. But is it possible to still get a demagogue in a functioning and strong democracy? That’s the argument of Mehdi Shadmehr in his paper: “Demagogues and the Fragility of Democracy”.

One of the scariest features of this research is that once a country elects a single demagogue they can create a political death spiral that can lead the country into financial ruin. With the long running debate around Trump’s demagoguery in the background, and the 2020 election on the horizon, we discuss Shadmehr’s findings.

Why don’t we prepare better for crises we know are coming? What effect will the coronavirus pandemic have on Trump’s 2020 chances? Should we even be having an election in the midst of a viral outbreak? On this episode, we turn to the best political science research to answer these questions and more about the politics behind COVID-19.

We’re constantly told by journalists and academics that America is too divided. That people no long just oppose members of the opposite party, but actually hate them. That something is broken, not just in our politics but in American life generally.

On this episode, we take these issues to one of the leading scholars in the world on polarization, Dr. Shanto Iyengar from Stanford University. We focus specifically on one of his papers, https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-polarization.pdf, that argues that affective polarization really has gotten as bad as the experts say, and we discuss what we can do about it.

 Do primaries attract more extremist voters who skew elections toward candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump? The common thought has always been that extremist voters, because of their intense passion on issues, are more likely to vote in primaries. But one scholar at UCLA says the real story is far more complicated.   On this episode, we speak with esteemed political scientist Lynn Vavreck about her paper on representation in primary elections, and what her research can tell us about the current democratic primary.   Paper: <a title="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/on-the-representativeness-of-primary-electorates/06414B6E17368D52B3F77EC9C3BF1520" href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/on-the-representativeness-of-primary-electorates/06414B6E17368D52B3F77EC9C3BF1520" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/on-the-representativeness-of-primary-electorates/06414B6E17368D52B3F77EC9C3BF1520</a>

Could racially charged policies cause you to act racist, even if you aren’t actually a racist? That’s the story two political scientists, Stephane Wolton and Torun Dewan from the London School of Economics and Political Science, tell in a recent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3397918

On this episode, we discuss the possibly hidden story behind symbolic policies like the Trump administration’s border wall and Muslim travel ban, or Europe’s burqa bans. Could these racially charged policies really be about economics?

Do divisive primaries actually affect how candidates will perform in general elections? It's a question political scientist have been trying and failing to untangle, but we found someone who may have an answer.

With the 2020 democratic primary getting into full swing, we're kicking off our inaugural episode with prof. Alexander Fouirnaies whose research gives us new insights into the effects of divisive primaries and what we can expect from the 2020 Presidential election.

You can find Fouirnaies' paper about primaries here.