Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained by a model of top-down persuasion by party elites. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at […] Read more »
Why Progressive Candidates Should Invoke Conservative Values
To beat President Trump in the 2020 election, what sort of policies should a Democratic nominee promote? … An influential analysis of national polling data by Professors Ellis and Stimson suggests that the most effective candidate in a national election would combine the most popular feature of the Democratic Party, […] Read more »
The Democratic Party has moved left — but so has the U.S.
The Democratic Party has moved left in recent years. Evidence from 2000, 2004 and 2008 suggests that until then, the party’s positions on a wide range of issues were like those of many center-right parties in other rich democracies. But starting in 2012, the Democrats began shifting left — and […] Read more »
Would Republican senators ever vote to convict Trump? Here’s what we can learn from the rest of the world.
… In parliamentary systems, the legislative majority party selects the government leader. Those parties can “fire” their own prime minister if he or she grows unpopular. … This is why a president’s party so infrequently supports impeachment: Doing so tends to hurt the party more than it helps. Only in […] Read more »
Political Communication Meets Big Data
How do voters make sense of the information they hear about candidates in the news and through social media? This question was at the heart of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, and Gallup to study political communication that took place during the 2016 U.S. […] Read more »
Aversion to loss, fueled by polarization, explains why a disgraced Trump is better for Republicans
After two weeks of public impeachment hearings where damning evidence was presented by numerous credible witnesses, Republicans remain steadfast in their support for their president. Trump himself has famously said that he could shoot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any of his political support. […] Read more »