… In our article in Political Behavior, we reexamine the evidence for motivated learning. In a series of experiments, we presented people with tabular data from a putative study on a social policy, either gun control or raising the minimum wage. Following Kahan et al., we manipulated the congeniality of […] Read more »
Ordering Vindaloo or Hunting for Venison? How You Vote
… As a political scientist, I’ve been asking people about their experiences with people who are different from them. In 2008, I wrote a series of questions to measure cosmopolitanism. I asked seven questions about travel, sports and food to tap into behaviors that expose people to varying levels of […] Read more »
What Is a Populist? And is Donald Trump one?
Why does Donald Trump exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd, brag about his election win in conversations with world leaders, and claim without evidence that voter fraud may have cost him the popular vote? Why does he dismiss protesters who oppose him as “paid professionals” and polls that reflect […] Read more »
Theodore Lowi, Zealous Scholar of Presidents and Liberalism, Dies at 85
Theodore J. Lowi, a venerated political scientist who challenged conventional scholarship on presidential power and identified the emergence of what he called “interest-group liberalism,” died on Feb. 17 in Ithaca, N.Y. … Professor Lowi acerbically coined what he called the “Law of Succession,” which holds that each new president enhances […] Read more »
Results from the Bright Line Watch U.S. Democracy Survey
BLW conducted its first U.S. Democracy Survey from February 13-19, 2017. We invited 9,820 political science faculty at 511 U.S. institutions to participate and received 1,571 responses (a response rate of 16 percent). … The survey had two broad goals. The first was to learn what qualities our respondents regard […] Read more »
More (on) Polarization
… Many studies have documented the widening gap between partisans of the two parties. The blatant contempt that Republicans and Democrats express towards each other in surveys has escalated in the last 20 years. … A 2015 study found that party prejudice is stronger than racial prejudice. Republican and Democratic […] Read more »