notanotherpoliticspodcast

Whether it’s trying to convince you to vote for a particular candidate or get vaccinated, the identity of the person who knocks on your door may matter. So who are the people who volunteer to do this canvassing? Are they likely to succeed?

These are all questions that Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos investigates in his paper, “Party Activists As Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign As A Principal-Agent Problem.” Using a rare dataset from Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, Enos delves into the politics of door to door campaigns, and we try and tease out some lessons for our current efforts to persuade people to get vaccinated.

Link To Paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/enoshershpa.pdf

Infrastructure. It’s one of the hottest topics in politics today. But what does the research say about the effects and politics of infrastructure investment?

Political scientist, Jon Rogowski, from the University of Chicago has a surprising paper that shows the long-term economic outcomes of post office developments in the United States. But it also gives us a lot to think about when it comes to who benefits, misses out, or even loses when infrastructure gets political.

Paper: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rogowski/files/post_office_development_ajps_final.pdf 

It seems like extremists politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene receive a disproportionate amount of attention and money. This has led many political actors to believe that extremism is good politics. There’s even some scientific research to back up that claim.

But a new paper by Professor of Politics at Princeton, Brandice Canes-Wrone, shows the exact opposite. It shows that, in fact, moderates may have better chances of getting elected than extremists. So, should more politicians take a moderate approach?

The debate about abolishing the filibuster isn’t going anywhere. Proponents say it forces compromise and consensus, while detractors claim it leads to gridlock and minority rule. But is there a third option?  

Harvard scholar, Kenneth Shepsle, has a radically different proposal that addresses all these concerns without abolishing the filibuster altogether. We discuss his idea on this episode.

A lot of people are unhappy with the ideological make-up of the Supreme Court. They say it doesn’t reflect the majority of the country. President Biden’s commission tasked with reforming the Supreme Court started meeting for the first time in May of this year. One of the proposals they’re going to consider is setting term limits on Justices. But they’re far from the first group to consider this idea.

Adam Chilton is a Professor of Law at The University of Chicago Law School and the author of a paper the proposes a set of Supreme Court reforms involving terms limits, and then runs simulations to show how the make-up of the Court could have been different if their reforms were in place. If we had term limits from the beginning, could we have avoided the problems people have with the Court?

We’ve been doing this podcast for over a year and we’ve covered a lot of research, but each paper is far from the final word on any topic.

On this episode, it’s time to do some updating. We’re going to take three recent papers and show how they change or deepen our understanding of prior papers we’ve covered on this podcast.  

Does the ability for minority parties to delay and obstruct legislation force the majority party to only pass bills that are more moderate? It’s a question that informs much of our political debate around dilatory tactics like the filibuster.

University of Michigan Political Scientist, Christian Fong, has a paper that models this question and argues that these delay and obstruct abiliities lead to policies that are closer to what the median voter may want. We discuss that paper, the filibuster and the possible strategies of Sen. Joe Manchin on this episode.

There’s a lot of debate in our politics about whether we should have stricter voter ID laws. But both sides are having an argument based almost entirely on assumptions because data on the real effect of these laws are scarce. Not anymore.

In a brand new paper, Stanford Political Scientist Justin Grimmer gives us a fresh look at whether stricter voter ID laws decrease turnout during elections. The numbers may surprise you.

This year the U.S. will go through its decennial redistricting process, which is resurfacing our national conversation around gerrymandering. But Stanford Professor of Political Science, Jonathan Rodden, says gerrymandering isn't the least of our problems when it comes to the politics of geography.

In his book, "Why Cities Lose", Rodden illustrates how we can still end up with minority majority rule, regardless of gerrymandering, due to the urban-rural divide. So, if the Democrats want to win more legislative seats, should they move to the suburbs?

Are land-use regulations incredibly boring? Not quite. As our guest argues, these seemingly banal policies could be causing modern-day segregation.

In a new paper, Jessica Trounstine, chair of the political science department a the University of California Merced, makes a strong case for why land-use policies aren’t as race-neutral as they seem, and why we need to pay more attention to them.

We’re constantly told that we’re trapped in media “echo chambers”, that our media diets mirror our political leanings. But what do the data say? Is it possible that a majority of us have a much more moderate media diet than we assume?

A new paper by Andrew Guess, Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton, provides a completely unique data set that complicates our assumptions about America’s “echo chambers” and media diets.

Paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rjsnp8k3im7377/AGuess_OMD_AJPS.pdf?dl=0

    When was the last time you voted split-ticket in an election? It may not be surprising to hear that our elections have become increasingly nationalized in the last few decades. Most people vote for a single party straight down the ballot. The question is, why?     Daniel Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Harris School of Public Policy, says the answer may be the massive reduction of local news. On this episode, we speak with Moskowitz about why nationalized elections are a problem, the key role of local news, and what we might do to fix things.   Paper: <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/local-news-information-and-the-nationalization-of-us-elections/4AEEA64CB7EC2CF384434AB0482E63F4"> https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/local-news-information-and-the-nationalization-of-us-elections/4AEEA64CB7EC2CF384434AB0482E63F4</a>         

Political scandal is a historically defining aspect of American politics. But, there’s been very little scholarship on the political incentives that surround the production and consequences of scandals.

In a recent paper, “Political Scandal: A Theory”, our very own Will Howell and Wioletta Dziuda create a new model of political scandal that makes these incentives clear. On this episode, we discuss how these incentives should reshape the way we think about political scandals.

One of the defining discussions of the Trump presidency centers on the fate of our democracy. In the aftermath of his populist presidency, and as we transition to the Biden era, we’re wondering whether the future is bright or dim.

There’s no better scholar to put this question to than the University of Chicago Professor and co-author of “Why Nations Fail”, James Robinson. We look forward and backward with Robinson to diagnose the health of our democracy.

It’s an extraordinarily distressing time for democracy in America. The storming of the Capitol and the votes by some Republican elected officials questioning the results of the 2020 election have many asking what force could act as a check on these increasing anti-democratic tendencies in American political life?  

A paper from Milan Svolik, Prof. of Political Science at Yale, may hold some answers. He investigates whether the American public would act as a check on anti-democratic politicians, and reveals how much we truly value democracy when we’re presented with tradeoffs.

It’s long been thought in political science that giving people resources through government programs will get them more involved in politics. But this has always been a difficult question to answer in a controlled environment. That is until the 2008 Medicaid expansion in Oregon.

There was an extensive research initiative done on the roll out of that expansion, and our boss and the Dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, Katherine Baicker, was involved. On this episode, we parse through the results with her to see if we can get a new perspective on this question.

This week, we took some time off for Thanksgiving so we're going to feature another University of Chicago Podcast Network show. It’s called Big Brains. On this episode, they spoke with Professor James Robinson, author of the renowned book Why Nations Fail, about his groundbreaking theories on why certain nations succeed and others fail as well as the future of America’s institutions. We hope you enjoy and we’ll see you soon for a new episode of Not Another Politics Podcast.

It’s hard to think of a presidential election that has raised as many questions as 2020. What do these results tell us about the views and desires of the American public, what the polls got right and wrong, and how all of this will affect our economy? To find some answers, we turned to two leading UChicago scholars—and fellow University of Chicago Podcast Network hosts to discuss what comes next, following the historic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Big Brains host Paul M. Rand welcomes Luigi Zingales, professor of economics and host of the Capitalisn’t podcast; and William Howell, chair of the Department of Political Science and host of the Not Another Politics Podcast, to untangle the record-setting 2020 campaign and debate the future of the country, post-President Trump.

The appointment of Amy Coney Barrett would make the Supreme Court more conservative than it has been in decades. Importantly, it also would be more conservative than the majority of the public. But one piece of political science research suggests that an out-of-step Court will not simply have its way in the years ahead.

Judges like to present themselves as arbiters of the law, free from the entanglements of politics. But work from Tom Clark, Professor of Political Science at Emory University, calls that idea into question, and shows why our new conservative Court may still follow public opinion.

On this second edition of the "Just Another Politics Podcast Special", we decide to join our fellow political podcasts in sitting back in our armchairs and sharing our thoughts on the first Presidential debate.

The day after the Vice Presidential debate, we recorded a response to what happened and what we think its affect on the 2020 election could be. We think this insightful conversation is worth sharing with you, even if it breaks our usual format.

Don't worry, we'll be back next episode with serious-minded research and science that looks at our politics and political system!