People who visit online news and political sites are more politically extreme. Well, duh.
No serious observer of American politics would be surprised if you made two basic claims: (1) Small-circulation media outlets (websites, cable channels, independent newspapers) can be far more ideologically extreme than large-circulation outlets (network news) that need to appeal to a large [...]
A few random observations from the 10th annual state politics conference, held last week in Abraham Lincoln’s home town:
Thad Kousser: Ask anybody here what a “good” state legislature should look like. Can anybody actually answer that? Seth Masket: Campaigns can matter. In districts that Colorado’s wealthy Democrats targeted via 527s, Democratic candidates for state legislature [...]
It may have been true 20, 30, or 40 years ago that members of Congress could evade accountability for Congress’s overall activities, but rising polarization has enabled voters to punish or reward Representatives for Congress’s collective performance.
Shortly before the 2008 Congressional elections, only 36% believed that most members of Congress deserved reelection. These numbers were [...]
The “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench.
Imagine you’re a soccer coach. You’ve got 14 players on your roster, 11 of whom are on the field at any given time. [...]
If you want your legislators to pass general policies that benefit the state as a whole, pay them less, make districts bigger, and strive for partisan balance. If you want your legislators to pass pork and other district-focused bills, pay them more, make districts smaller, and promote one-party government.
When will state legislators take on broad [...]
Conservatives are hard-working, organized, closed-minded, and emotionally stable. Liberals are lazy, disorganized, open-minded, and neurotic. Let’s see how the punditocracy spins that one.
Yesterday I wrote about Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article about personality and political participation. On the very next page of the same issue of APSR, you’ll find a closely related article by [...]
We cannot understand the effects of personality without accounting for the environment, and we cannot understand the effects of the environment without accounting for personality.
Political scientists pay very little attention to personality when they study political behavior. Instead, they prefer to look at environmental variables (campaign spending, personal income, personal education, candidate quality, electoral competitiveness, [...]
Education does, indeed, have a robust causal effect on voter turnout.
Suppose you’re in a room full of people and you want to know which of them are most likely to be active voters, but you’re not allowed to ask them about their political activity. The best question you can ask them: How many years of [...]
My name is Adam Brown. I am an assistant professor of political science. (Learn more.) I own the site and write most of the posts, although anybody can contribute. You can read more about this site here.
RSS