Not Another Politics Podcast
112 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago -With all the noise created by a 24/7 news cycle, it can be hard to really grasp what's going on in politics today. We provide a fresh perspective on the biggest political stories not through opinion and anecdotes, but rigorous scholarship, massive data sets and a deep knowledge of theory. Understand the political science beyond the headlines with Harris School of Public Policy Professors William Howell, Anthony Fowler and Wioletta Dziuda. Our show is part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.
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Episodes
Should Policy Match Voters' Preferences?
April 17, 2024 12:00 - 42 minutes - 39.3 MBHow do we know if our democracy is healthy? For political scientist, the answer often comes down to things we can measure like responsiveness to voter’s wishes. But is that really the right thing to measure? There are two camps in this debate. The empiricists want to focus on what and how we can measure things like the health of our democracy, often focusing on indicators like responsiveness, while the normative theorists want to focus on what we even mean…and what we should mean…by democra...
Are Too Many Political Appointments Harming Our Bureaucracy?
April 03, 2024 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.5 MBWhen 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 les...
Should Judges Be Elected or Appointed?
March 20, 2024 12:48 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBThere 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...
Why Women Are Underrepresented in U.S. Politics
March 06, 2024 13:00 - 50 minutes - 46.3 MBDespite making up roughly half of the U.S. population, women only make up about one-quarter of representatives and senators. And this trend is not just national—it holds true globally as well. What explains why women are underrepresented in politics? If women are just as likely to win elections as men do, then why are they less likely to run for office? In a recent paper, "Modeling Theories of Women's Underrepresentation in Elections," University of Chicago Professors Scott Ashworth, Christ...
What Makes A Legislator Effective?
February 21, 2024 13:00 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBWhen it comes to passing actual legislation, putting it forward and getting it all the way through the process, it can be difficult to measure exactly which legislators are effective. Not to mention which types of legislators tend to be more effective, moderates or extremists? And does majority-party membership increase effectives? In an innovative new paper, “Effective Lawmaking Across Congressional Eras”, University of Pittsburgh professor of political science Max Goplerud proposes a new ...
Do Conservatives Sabotage The Administrative State?
February 07, 2024 13:00 - 52 minutes - 47.7 MBWhen we talk about the interpretation and ultimately implementation of policy we’re not talking about Congress so much as the Administrative State. But what happens when those who work in those agencies decide through their positions to not only sabotage a policy they’re meant to carry out, but perhaps the whole agency? In a recent paper titled “Administrative Sabotage” Rutgers law professor, David Noll, looks at the history of how agencies sabotage themselves and discuses what this means f...
Who Gets Heard On Redistribution, The Rich Or Poor?
January 24, 2024 13:00 - 49 minutes - 45.1 MBWhen we talk about policy choices around redistribution there is an assumption so obvious that most people never question it. That politicians are more responsive to the desires of the rich, and that policy preferences of the poor don’t hold as much sway. But what if that assumption was wrong? In a recent paper by Boston University Economist Raymond Fisman titled “Whose Preference Matter For Redistribution: Cross-Country Evidence” uses cross-sectional data from 93 countries to see how much ...
Can We Believe Political Surveys?
January 10, 2024 13:00 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBHello listeners! Our team took some end of the year time off, but we know your holiday travel wouldn’t be complete without some in-depth political science research. So, we’re release some episodes we think are going to be very relevant as we move into an 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...
Should It Be Illegal Not To Vote?
December 27, 2023 13:00 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBHello listeners! Our team took some end of the year time off, but we know your holiday travel wouldn’t be complete without some in-depth political science research. So, we’re release some episodes we think are going to be very relevant as we move into an 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...
Is There A "Spiral of Silence" On Campus And In Our Politics?
December 13, 2023 13:00 - 48 minutes - 44.3 MBThe recent crisis in the Israel and Palestine conflict has added fuel to the already heated debate over free speech in our politics and on college campuses. Does the scientific literature having anything to tell us about the health of public discourse in these domains? A recent paper by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Yihong Huang titled “Breaking the Spiral of Silence” holds some answers. It looks at how the attention we pay, or don’t pay, to who stays silent in a debate can exacerbate self-censor...
The Bargaining Strategies of Extremists
November 29, 2023 13:00 - 50 minutes - 46 MBThere is a political puzzle that has become prominent in the last few decades, especially with the recent turmoil over the Republican led Speaker of the House: how do a small group of extremists manage to get their way despite being a minority of members? In a recent paper, “Organizing at the Extreme: Hardline Strategy and Institutional Design” University of Chicago Political Scientist Ruth Bloch Rubin takes that question head on. Her conclusions could tell us a lot about the bargaining str...
Is Gridlock Causing Polarization?
November 15, 2023 12:28 - 49 minutes - 45.8 MBWe 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 sho...
Partisan Identities vs Anti-Establishment Orientations
November 01, 2023 12:04 - 56 minutes - 52 MBWhen 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-Establ...
LIVE: Does Money Distort Our Politics?
October 18, 2023 12:00 - 48 minutes - 44.3 MBIf 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 qu...
Presidential Power, Parties, And The Rise Of The Administrative State
October 04, 2023 12:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBOne 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 ther...
Does Social Media Polarize Our Politics?
September 20, 2023 12:00 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MBIt’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 behavior...
Is Partisan Gerrymandering As Bad As You Think?
September 06, 2023 12:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBThere 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 gerry...
Does Ousting Incumbents Improve The Economy?
August 23, 2023 12:00 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBThe 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 performan...
Do Partisans Really Believe Different Facts?
August 09, 2023 12:00 - 48 minutes - 44.3 MBThe 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 w...
Is Voter Rationality A Test Of A Health Democracy?
July 26, 2023 13:14 - 48 minutes - 44.1 MBThere’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 list...
When Fox Viewers Watch CNN Instead
July 12, 2023 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBPartisan 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 fasc...
Do White Americans Favor White Politicians?
June 21, 2023 12:00 - 47 minutes - 44.1 MBAs 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 w...
Do Stimulus Checks Buy Votes?
June 07, 2023 12:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBWe’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 20...
Can You Judge A Politician By Their Looks?
May 24, 2023 12:00 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBWe 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 fo...
Can Citizen Appeals Change Government Action?
May 10, 2023 12:00 - 43 minutes - 40.4 MBWhen 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 al...
Does Bad Government Breed Populism?
April 26, 2023 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.1 MBWhy 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 provi...
Do Political Endorsements Undermine Trust In Science?
April 12, 2023 12:00 - 47 minutes - 43.4 MBIn 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 ...
Do Politicians Spend Money Differently Depending On Its Source?
March 30, 2023 12:00 - 47 minutes - 43.1 MBPaper link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273001
How Does Representation Work?
March 15, 2023 12:14 - 41 minutes - 37.6 MBPaper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1952717
The Polarization Of State Legislatures
March 01, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes - 45 MBPaper link: https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlpip/113.00000063.html
Are We In A Period Of Global Democratic Decline?
February 15, 2023 13:11 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MBThe 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 prof...
Political Brokers In India’s Most Marginalized Communities
February 02, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBOn 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 A...
An Algorithm for Detecting Election Fraud
January 18, 2023 13:00 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBFor better or worse, one of the biggest stories in US politics today is the detection of election fraud, or in many cases the lack of election fraud. But determining whether fraud happened in an election can be difficult, even while proving the validity of elections for some has become increasingly important. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could just plug a set of data from an election into a toolkit that could give us an answer if fraud occurred? Well, one political scientist from the Univ...
Why The U.S. Isn’t As Polarized As It Seems
January 05, 2023 13:00 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBAs we approach the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, we wanted to reflect on where we are as a country and whether politics are really as polarized as they seem. Our co-host Will Howell recently joined another University of Chicago podcast called Big Brains to discuss these very questions. We're going to share that episode with you this week, we hope you enjoy it, and look forward to being back with a new episode in a few weeks.
Why Aren't the Majority Of Voters Getting What They Want?
December 21, 2022 13:00 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBLately 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 Gro...
An International Look At Affective Polarization
December 07, 2022 13:00 - 44 minutes - 41.4 MBPaper: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01160/109262/Cross-Country-Trends-in-Affective-Polarization?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Why Aren't There More Moderate Politicians?
November 23, 2022 13:34 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBWe 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 sci...
LIVE: How Members Of Congress Forge Relationships With Their Voters
November 09, 2022 13:00 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBThis 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 ...
What Can We Learn About Polarization From The UK?
October 26, 2022 12:21 - 48 minutes - 44 MBOne 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 par...
Are Legislators Beating The Market With Insider Information?
October 12, 2022 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.6 MBThere 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 ...
Do Primaries Cause Polarization?
September 28, 2022 12:14 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBFor 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. Congr...
Can Fact-Checking Counter Misinformation?
September 14, 2022 12:57 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBThe 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 scient...
Do People Automatically Reject Policies Of The Opposite Party?
August 31, 2022 12:00 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBIn 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...
Does The Economy Affect Elections?
August 17, 2022 12:33 - 41 minutes - 38.6 MBThe 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 par...
Best Of: Does Ranked Choice Reduce Strategic Voting?
August 03, 2022 12:00 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBSomething 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 len...
Did Voter Turnout Drop in Communities of Color After Shelby?
July 20, 2022 12:00 - 40 minutes - 36.9 MBNearly 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...
Do Local Minimum Wages Represent Local Preferences?
July 06, 2022 12:00 - 50 minutes - 46.8 MBAdvocates 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 ...
Roe & Departure From Precedent In The Supreme Court
June 22, 2022 12:00 - 56 minutes - 52 MBThere’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 Co...
Revealing New Data On Who Donates To Campaigns
June 08, 2022 12:00 - 49 minutes - 45.4 MBThere 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 strategical...
Best Of: Fixing the Filibuster
May 25, 2022 11:29 - 46 minutes - 43 MBAs 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...