… Psychologists and political scientists have documented a link between terrorist attacks and public antipathy toward immigrants and minorities, but the nature of the connection depends on economic, demographic and political factors — which vary from country to country and from tragedy to tragedy. It is difficult to generalize, said […] Read more »
Politics and the New Machine
… The Path to Office is long. To reach the Land of Caucuses and Primaries, the Candidate must first cross the Sea of Polls. … Lately, the Sea of Polls is deeper than ever before, and darker. From the late nineteen-nineties to 2012, twelve hundred polling organizations conducted nearly thirty-seven […] Read more »
New Hampshire Political Junkies Go Public
Every four years, as interest in New Hampshire’s presidential primary increases, two political scientists at the University of New Hampshire find their services in high demand. Now they are offering their insights to the general public through a new online course. Here & Now Read more »
Sheldon S. Wolin, Theorist Who Shifted Political Science Back to Politics
Sheldon S. Wolin, a political theorist whose landmark 1960 book “Politics and Vision” shifted the center of gravity back to politics, rather than economics or sociology, in the field of political science, and who went on to analyze the possibilities and limits of popular democracy in a series of influential […] Read more »
Maybe Republicans Really Are In Disarray
… We’re inclined to give more attention to theories of the 2016 campaign that (in the manner of testable scientific hypotheses) were proposed before it began. And we give more credence to narratives that rely on evidence other than polls, since polls just aren’t very predictive of much at this […] Read more »
Why the views of ‘political experts’ may be just as biased and error ridden as those of ‘non-experts’
… Despite the largely uncritical acceptance of the concept of political expertise among political pundits, theorists, and political scientists, there is precious little evidence to support the claim that politically knowledgeable citizens form their opinions in a manner befitting the term “expertise.” In fact, when we have looked at the […] Read more »