Not Another Politics Podcast

We all know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but if we’re being honest we all do it on occasion anyway. Could it be that we also elect our politicians just based on how they look? Of course, there’s the old idea of looking “presidential”, but how much power does that really have to sway an election?

A famous paper by University of Chicago behavioral scientist Alexander Todorov provides us with some surprising insights. Just by flashing two faces of competing politicians for mere seconds, participants were able to accurately judge the outcomes of elections based on how competent they thought the politicians looked. It’s a curious finding that raises more questions than it answers, and we dig into both on this episode.  

When citizens directly appeal to their government, are their concerns ignored or taken seriously? It’s an important question for understanding norms around accountability, especially in authoritarian regimes. 

To find some answers, University of Chicago Professor of Public Policy Shaoda Wang helped develop a clever field experiment evaluating how Chinese regulators respond to citizen appeals about companies violating pollution standards. 

The experiment is fascinating on its own, but it also provides a wealth of data about the effectiveness of citizen appeals, how corporations respond when complaints are public or private, and even the incentives companies follow when it comes to adhering to pollution standards. 

Why is populism on the rise across the globe? One story says this movement is driven by anti-elite and anti-establishment sentiment, that they just want to throw the bums out. Another says it’s driven by identity politics, an anti-immigrant pro-nativist ideology. Both stories don’t leave room for much hope. But what if there was another story that not only gives us some hope but supplies a clear solution.

A new paper by economist Giacomo Ponzetto from the Barcelona School of Economics provides us just that story. It’s called “Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Municipalities”, and it looks at home simply increasing the effectiveness of local government may decrease support for populist candidates.

Paper link: https://bse.eu/research/working-papers/do-incompetent-politicians-breed-populist-voters-evidence-italian

In the runup to the 2020 election, the academic journal Nature made the unprecedented decision to endorse Joe Biden for President. During an era when trust in science has never seemed more crucial, this decision led many to wonder if explicitly political statements increase or decrease public trust in science.

Luckily, one PhD graduate from the Stanford School of Business designed a well-crafted experiment to find an answer. Using the Nature endorsement as a test case, Floyd Zhang wrote a paper that helps us explore the effects of public trust when scientific journals make endorsements.

Paper link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3273001

Paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1952717

Paper link: https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlpip/113.00000063.html 

The popular narrative these days is that democracies around the globe are backsliding. If we turn to countries like Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela, this threat certainly is true — authoritarian dictators have contributed to democratic decline. But what does the global picture reveal? Does the claim hold true? A new paper by Anne Meng and Andrew Little investigates this question, by analyzing more objective indicators such as incumbent performance in elections.

Anne Meng is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Link to paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4327307 

On this show, we focus a lot on ideological polarization but it’s important to remember that politics is about more than ideology or even policy victories. It’s about distribution and redistribution of goods and services in return for party support, votes. This view of politics is called clientelism, and it often goes overlooked.

One of the landmark papers on clientelism is from Tariq Thatchil, a political scientist at The University of Pennsylvania. It won the award for best paper in the APSR in 2018, and it’s called “How Clients Select Brokers, Competition and Choice in India’s Slums”. Their investigation prompts a re-thinking of the dynamics of clientelism and perhaps even holds some lessons for how to re-think the ideological view of politics as well.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5310a4d8e4b05a56d51f81c8/t/5b4cbc711ae6cf1a9051724e/1531755638231/Auerbach_Thachil_APSR.pdf

Lately it feels like politicians are favoring smaller groups of their constituents over the majority of them. If you've been skeptical about whether this favoritism exists, there's a new theory that supports it. Some voters who are more vocal or intense about political issues are more likely to get their local politician's attention, and these smaller groups of constituents are more likely to get what they want.

In his new book, Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want, University of San Diego political scientist Seth J. Hill uses new empirical evidence to tackle a question that has been floating on the radar: Is democracy broken or are politicians becoming more undemocratic with their approach to win votes?

Paper: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01160/109262/Cross-Country-Trends-in-Affective-Polarization?redirectedFrom=fulltext