Not Another Politics Podcast

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, has there been an increase in donations to extremist candidates, and are the coasts influencing elections more than the rest of the country by donating more money?

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 moment.

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 Berkeley political scientist calls this theory into question. On this episode, we discuss Robert Powell’s “Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power”. In it, Powell builds a model that explains how conflicts can lead to nuclear war even under mutually assured destruction, but also how threat of that war changes the dynamics of any conflict from the beginning. Both findings give us a number of insights into the current situation in Ukraine.

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 police funding. The findings have made huge waves in the media, so we decided to take our unique microscope to the paper to see if we can get a fuller picture of what these findings tell us.

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".

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 are more likely to depend on lobbyists when there are partisan and ideological mismatches with their state legislators.

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

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.

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 result about college football games was a false-positive, and what lessons we should draw from this exchange.

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