When Joe Biden was elected president, a common refrain was that he would usher in a new era of “normalcy” after four chaotic years of President Donald Trump. But in certain ways, normalcy hasn’t returned. This is visible first and foremost in the inflation rate, which in May was higher […] Read more »
Roe ruling shows complex relationship between court, public
The Supreme Court ruling to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is unpopular with a majority of Americans — but did that matter? The relationship between the public and the judiciary has been studied and debated by legal and political scholars. The short answer: it’s complicated. There’s evidence that […] Read more »
Many states with antiabortion laws have pro-choice majorities
… We set out to find out what percentage of people in each state support legal abortions. Drawing on work by one of us and Devin Caughey, we used micro-data from publicly available probability polls from academic surveys such as American National Election Studies and media polls we obtained via […] Read more »
Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish in Trump’s America
Whether he is out of power or in office, Donald Trump deploys conspiracy theory as a political mobilizing tool designed to capture anger at the liberal establishment, to legitimize racial resentment and to unite voters who feel oppressed by what they see as a dominant socially progressive culture. The success […] Read more »
How Elites Misread Public Opinion
… As the political scientists Joshua Kertzer and Jonathan Renshon detail in a new paper in the Annual Review of Political Science, the rise of populist movements has coincided with a rise in the use of “elite experiments” — or randomized studies using elite subjects — in academia as a […] Read more »
A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack
The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism. Bell enlisted an […] Read more »