Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars and professionals have turned to the Internet to gather samples of subjects for research ranging from public opinion surveys to experiments in the social sciences. While there has been a focus on whether online samples are representative and accurate, fewer studies […] Read more »
How political scientists got Trump exactly wrong
As a political scientist, I feel I owe you an apology. To say my discipline has been behind the curve this electoral season would be putting it too charitably. We haven’t missed one curve yet. We’re speeding through all of them – backwards. At the beginning of this year’s US […] Read more »
When Should You Start Worrying About the Polls? Not Quite Yet
Since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, several national polls have shown him narrowing the gap with his likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, or even leading. But the election is more than five months away. When should you start to care about polls? With some caveats, we believe the answer […] Read more »
Do Sanders Supporters Favor His Policies?
… The notion that elections are decided by voters’ carefully weighing competing candidates’ stands on major issues reflects a strong faith in American political culture that citizens can control their government from the voting booth. We call it the “folk theory” of democracy. When candidates surpass expectations, observers caught up […] Read more »
The rise of American authoritarianism, explained in 6 minutes
Almost all political experts and pundits underestimated the support that Donald Trump could attract within the Republican Party. But years ago, a small group of political scientists studying authoritarianism published research that forecast the rise of a candidate just like Trump. Joss Fong & Amanda Taub, Vox Read more »
How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump
… Trump is one of the most astonishing stories in American political history. If you really expected the Republican front-runner to be bragging about the size of his anatomy in a debate, or to be spending his first week as the presumptive nominee feuding with the Republican speaker of the […] Read more »