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, [...]
“For many Americans, there is no rational basis to suppose that one party is better than the other at managing the economy.” If that’s true, is our entire democratic process a farce?
We know that partisanship influences economic evaluations. In survey after survey, we have found that Republicans and Democrats rate the economy differently, yet we [...]
The authors have identified a cheap, easy way to capture a fuller sample of current campaign messages.
We’ve long known that most voters pay little attention to campaign rhetoric; they pay far more attention to partisanship, incumbency, and other easily accessible considerations (although rhetoric certainly has its place). Still, candidates work hard to develop arguments that, [...]
In every case, he was startlingly correct; as predicted, the nation’s ideological mood reversed about every 15 years.
In 1924, Arthur Schlesinger famously predicted that “Coolidge-style conservatism would last till about 1932.” Later, he added that the “prevailing liberal mood would run its course in about 1947.” In 1949, he predicted once again that “the recession [...]
The public wouldn’t get the policies it wants; it would get the policies it was duped into wanting.
In a democracy, politicians and policy outcomes should be responsive to changes in public opinion. But what if politicians (or others, such as media commentators) were able to manipulate public opinion through propaganda or other, more subtle methods? [...]
Why can some Americans agree to disagree with their “worthy opposition” while others dismiss their political opponents as irrational lunatics?
Do we truly believe that ALL red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that ALL blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping [...]
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.
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