… American democracy is facing two distinct threats, which together represent the most serious challenge to the country’s governing ideals in decades. The first threat is acute: a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an […] Read more »
The Economic Pit and the Political Pendulum: Predicting Midterm Elections
We were given the following prompt in July 2022 and asked to write a response: “The Economy, Stupid: Accepted wisdom has it that it’s the economy that matters to voters. Will other issues matter in the upcoming midterm elections, or will it really be all about the economy?” In the […] Read more »
A hard 2020 lesson for the midterms: Our politics are calcified
… Voters are increasingly tied to their political loyalties and values. They have become less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate. This is not just polarization but calcification. And just as it does in the body, calcification produces rigidity in our politics […] Read more »
Why Aren’t You Voting in Your Financial Self-Interest?
Why do millions of Americans on both the right and the left ignore their own economic self-interest when they choose which political party to support? Partisan prioritization of cultural and racial issues has, to a notable extent, superseded the economic conflicts that once characterized the nation’s politics, leading to what […] Read more »
Are the Forecast Models just plain Wrong?
I like to put together a little economic forecast model around this point in an election cycle. Not so much because I’m trying to predict what’ll happen — there are more sophisticated ways to do that — but because I want to get a sense of a baseline. That is, […] Read more »
Megastudy identifying successful interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes
Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy on a national sample of American partisans (n = 32,059) testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity. These interventions were selected from a pool of 252 interventions submitted by […] Read more »