Not Another Politics Podcast

Since Biden’s debate performance, America’s political elite have been engaged in a debate. How much does a President really matter for effective government? If his administration seems to work fine, how much of an affect can a President have? At the same time, we important Supreme Court decisions that seem to be giving more power to Presidents which makes finding answers to these questions even more pressing.Well, there is one famous political scientist who explored these questions long ago in one of the most well-known texts in the field “President Power and the Modern Presidents” by Richard Neustadt. It’s a book that sat bedside for several Presidents in the White House. It was meant to inform them about how they ought to exercise power and where they might actually be able to find power in a system that was stacked against them. It's worth taking stock of his argument and trying to make sense of both its elements and the extent to which it speaks to this president political moment.

Have you ever made a 311 call? This is a service provided by many cities that allows citizens to call in things like potholes, graffiti, fallen trees, ect. There is an assumption that many people have that requests made by white and more affluent neighborhoods probably get responded to faster. But is that accurate? In a recent paper, “Unequal Responsiveness in City Service Delivery: Evidence from 24 Million 311 Calls” Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow Derek Holliday uses a large an unique dataset to find some surprising answers. But what are the implications of these findings, and are they positive or concerning results?

Hello Not Another Politics Podcast listeners. We’re taking some much needed time off as the school year comes to a close; but with the elections right around the corner we still wanted to share some incredibly relevant and important political science research.Every Presidential election, we talk about “getting out the vote”. But what really works in terms of getting people to go to the polls? 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.And thanks to everyone who listened to our podcast this year. We don’t make money off this show, it’s a labor of love to make important scientific research interesting and accessible…but your support is crucial to helping us to continue that mission. The data shows that the number one way podcasts grow is through word of mouth. If you could please just tell a friend, a family member, co-worker to listen to our show it would help us immensely. Thanks again!

Hello Not Another Politics Podcast listeners. We’re taking some much needed time off as the school year comes to a close; but with the elections right around the corner we still wanted to share some incredibly relevant and important political science research. This week we’re resharing an episode all about October Surprises that has some counter intuitive insights that could become important during this election year. And thanks to everyone who listened to our podcast this year. We don’t make money off this show, it’s a labor of love to make important scientific research interesting and accessible, but your support is crucial to helping us to continue that mission. The data shows that the number one way podcasts grow is through word of mouth. If you could please just tell a friend, a family member, co-worker to listen to our show it would help us immensely. Thanks again!

The Supreme Court is supposed to be our non-political branch of government, making decisions solely on the constitutional soundness of laws. But in recent years it appears as though the Court has taken a shift to the right, most notably in the Dobbs decision in 2022. Which raises a question: does the public still the view the Court as legitimate?Those are the questions explored in a new paper from UPenn political scientist Matthew Levendusky in a paper titled “Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of court approval and legitimacy in a post-Dobbs world”. 

If the media is to be believed, the US public has a tenuous at best grasp on accurate political news. They’re either consuming disinformation and fake news on social media or following biasedly inaccurate news outlets. Either journalistic truth is as good as dead or we’re living in separate informational universes. But is this too alarmist, could the real story be more nuanced?That’s what Columbia professor of economics Andrea Prat finds in his recent paper “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News”. But what are we to make of these results, and how do we square them with claims of political polarization?

There is a fact of our political discourse so agreed upon that nobody thinks to question it: affective polarization…democrats and republicans disliking each other...has been getting worse, much worse. But what if that belief is actually based on polls measuring the wrong thing?That’s the argument made by Northwestern Political Scientist James Druckman in his paper “What Do We Measure When We Measure Affective Polarization?”

Debate on measuring democracy's health by responsiveness vs. normative theories. Challenges in aligning policy with public opinion and the influence of elitism. Bridging the gap between political theorists and empiricists. Importance of minority rights in democracy and exploring congruence in public policy. Critique of normative political philosophy and advocating for unbiased scientific measurement for evaluating democracy's functioning.

When it comes to our federal bureaucracy, there are two schools of thought. One says that an insulated group of career bureaucrats have created a deep state that corrupts the performance of government. The other says that our bureaucracy is dysfunctional because there is too much turnover or positions left vacant. Both rest on an underlying feature of our democracy: many of the positions in the federal bureaucracy are appointed by the President and approved by Congress. But, could having less politically selected appointments give us a more functional government?In this episode, we’re doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with David Lewis from Vanderbilt University who wrote a primer on this question: should we have more politically appointed bureaucrats or less?

There is a long running debate in political science: do we get better judges by letting the public vote in elections or by giving our leaders the power to appoint them? One side says that judges should be insulated from the influence of politics involved in elections, focusing entirely on the rule of law. The other side says that our judges should be accountable to the public for the decisions they make in office. Who is right?In this episode, we’re doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar  who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with Sanford Gordon from the Politics Department at NYU who wrote a primer on this question: is it better to elect or appoint judges?