Not Another Politics Podcast

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 actually depolarized. Did elite depolarization lead to public depolarization, and what lessons do this data hold for the US?

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 Congress actually advanced investors, and how much are they benefiting from inside information? In a 2014 paper by University of Chicago's Andy Eggers and Stanford University's Jens Hainmueller titled, Political Capital: Corporate Connections and Stock Investments in the U.S. Congress, they look at a wide data set of investments made by hundreds of members of Congress between 2004 and 2008, to see whether or not they're getting an unfair advantage. The results may surprise you.

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”. The findings are surprising and may have some key insights for how we should think about primary elections in the U.S.

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 Ethan Porter decided to look at COVID-19 misinformation spanning across ten countries, from Brazil to Nigeria, to the United States. He and his co-authors evaluated factual corrections in these ten countries to see whether or not they changed people's beliefs and whether they got vaccinated.

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 Howell and Anthony Fowler demonstrate that more robust research designs leads to a completely different conclusion. The American public may be more open to deliberative policy positions than we think; they just need to be given the option.

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 vote share over the better part of a century. On this episode, we discuss that paper, what it can tell us about the Democrat’s chances in the 2022 midterms, and if the possible effects of the Inflation Reduction Act.

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 on ranked choice voting and the relationship between ranked choice voting and strategic voting. We hope you enjoy it. And we'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode of Not Another Politics Podcast.

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 dramatically reduce voter participation in communities of color. Did they? The University of Rochester's Mayya Komisarchik and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Ariel White sought to answer that question in their recent paper, "Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court’s Shelby Decision." In this episode, we speak to Komisarchik about the impacts of the Shelby decision and whether our fears about countermobilization and voter suppression tactics have held true.

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 public preferences” provides a possible answer by way of locally set minimum wages. When local governments increase their minimum wages, do they accurately match local preferences? The answer is surprising, and has implications for policies beyond just minimum wage.

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 Constitutional Precedent: An Empirical Study of the Roberts Court", co-authored by William M. Landes and Adam Liptak.