More than 200 years after its creation, the vice presidency remains the least defined, and outright oddest, major political office in the United States. With almost no formal powers but the critical responsibility of needing to be prepared to assume the leadership of the nation at any moment, vice presidents […] Read more »
What today’s GOP demonstrates about the dangers of partisan conformity
Rep. Liz Cheney talks to reporters after House Republicans voted to remove her as conference chair on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Robert B. Talisse, Vanderbilt University Directly following the 2020 election, Republicans seemed to be through with Donald Trump. Party leaders stopped speaking to him […] Read more »
Religion and the Culture Wars: A Re-examination
… The lack of scholarly consensus on mass-level religious polarization is, at least in part, a product of poor measures of issue polarization. In our recent and upcoming research to be published in Political Behavior, we introduce a new way of measuring issue polarization and then analyze how religious identities […] Read more »
The ACA Survives, in One More Victory for Boring Old Liberalism
Plain vanilla American liberalism hasn’t been particularly fashionable for a long time, and it certainly isn’t now. Anyone who regularly consumes high-status media like NPR or the Wall Street Journal, or who spends any time at all in the Twitterverse, could well conclude that today’s politics is mostly defined by […] Read more »
Why The Two-Party System Is Wrecking American Democracy
As the “Big Lie” of a stolen election continues to dominate the Republican Party, GOP-controlled states enact restrictive voting laws and pursue preposterous election audits, aspiring candidates embrace the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, and a majority of GOP voters still believe Trump is the “true president,” the obvious […] Read more »
Trumpism Without Borders
America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump. The peculiarly American characteristics of the Trump […] Read more »