Why do some people seem to vote against their economic interests? Why do politicians enact policies that seem contrary to the interests of the people who vote for them? Why do people engage in protest when they could reap the benefits of others’ protest without having to get involved? These […] Read more »
Here’s how political science explains the GOP’s obsession with civility
On Wednesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the surprise Democratic primary winner from New York’s 14th Congressional District, said, “[T]he Democratic Party is a big tent and there are so many ways to be a Democrat.” In this, she is correct. Democrats have been, sometimes uncomfortably, forced to find connections and common cause […] Read more »
The divided public heart
What drives political change – culture or economics? The surge of the Right in the United States and Europe in the past two years has renewed debate on this important question. On one side, the cultural determinists attribute Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise of European populist movements to nativism, […] Read more »
Left Economy, Right Economy
… Since the 2016 election, the partisan economic expectations gap—that is, the difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ assessment of the economy’s direction—has widened to an unprecedented level, going from roughly 20 points during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama to 56 points today. Democrats now […] Read more »
How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. … In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, […] Read more »
Long Before Cambridge Analytica, a Belief in the ‘Power of the Subliminal’
Nearly three decades ago, an ambitious young London advertising executive named Nigel Oakes fell out with his partners, two psychologists, over a central claim of his new business: That using the tools of social science, he could plant motivations in a person’s brain without their knowledge, prompting them to behave […] Read more »