Moderate Voters Matter
New #ScienceOfPolitics podcast/transcript with Anthony Fowler
Most Americans' views are well-described by the left-right ideological spectrum; they're just in the middle. Those moderates swing elections.
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Matt Grossmann
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Michigan State political scientist & Director; Co-owner; Also: ; New book: How Social Science Got Better
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Governors, regardless of party, usually call for spending increases in State of the State addresses. They obtain 70% of the size of their budget requests on average, with success driven more by economic prospects than partisanship
hookedlansing.com/book/978110870
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"We survey other more objective indicators of democracy and find little evidence of global democratic decline over the last decade.
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The simplest explanation is that recent declines in average democracy scores are driven by changes in coder bias."
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf
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The Long Great Society era produced not only bigger government, but an array of interest groups & professions to expand expertise-driven government; it has been hard for conservatives to unwind, in part because they saw it as an extension of the New Deal
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(Late reading but) I enjoyed The Code Breaker as a recent bio/history, a biology review, & a take on the role of both cooperation & competition in science
hookedlansing.com/book/978198211
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Elementary schools are less likely to be closed when an elected official lives nearby
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Floyd protests decreased support for police funding & polarized it along racial lines: evidence from local regular voting
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In countries with politically organized ethnic minorities, democratic institutions & practices remain more resilient. mobilized ethnic minorities provide socially rooted electorates with needs for political rights that counterbalance illiberal parties
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State of the State addresses are much more fun to give when the budget is flush: tax cuts & spending increases galore. You can also tell the Republicans didn't expect to lose MI legislative control: they left a lot of $ on the table.
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Geographic polarization & Republican gains in rural areas continue & are associated with place-based resentment of metropolitan elites
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Most Americans cannot name anyone local that is influential or powerful. When they do, they mostly name political officials. That is unlike in prior decades, when most people knew & named the local business elite
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Polarization is widespread in the states but, unlike Congress, Democrats are moving further than Republicans
nowpublishers.com/article/Detail
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This model is not right because extremism mobilizes the opposition more than mobilizing your own side
nowpublishers.com/article/Detail
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The rise of partisan think tanks is closely related to polarization in Congress
nowpublishers.com/article/Detail
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Given the conventional wisdom of pundits and consultants, it's pretty wild that the best estimates we have are that BLM protests really helped Democrats in 2020.
ungated: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf
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Non-fiction book sales were way down in 2022. Romance was up >50% & carried fiction higher.
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Compared with European cities, US cities are half as accessible via public transit and twice as accessible via cars
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New article by Nicholson-Crotty et al. shows that police unions in the US aren't necessarily acting against use-of-force reforms. The authors find that police union activities correlate with a city’s political climate (liberal vs conservative).
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How democratic are ordinary citizens in Western democracies?
Academic research has extensively studied this question recently.
This 🧵summarizes some of the most important findings from the past 10 years in 22 short tweets 👇🏾
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Total jobs listed on ejobs' September newsletter, 2016-2022. Not perfect (it includes TT and non-TT jobs), but given that a lot of jobs are announced alongside APSA I think it's a decent measure of the job market across time.
#psjminfo
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Union membership is still declining, despite increasing public approval
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citizens with higher levels of affective polarization are more likely to believe in-party-congruent misinformation and less likely to believe out-party-congruent misinformation
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Official repeated reminders increase turnout
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District elections decrease the supply of new multifamily housing, particularly in segregated cities with underrepresented minority groups, by ending the disproportionate channeling of new housing into minority neighborhoods
mhankinson.com/documents/supp
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Members of Congress benefit from finding bipartisan co-sponsors, regardless of whether they are in the majority or minority, increasing their legislative effectiveness
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COVID policies diffused globally, especially through mimicry of geographic neighbors, political peers, and those with shared language
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State legislative candidates tend to overestimate how many of those they govern are struggling financially. politicians' policy preferences would be similar even if they had a more accurate understanding of reality
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both Republicans and Democrats punish Democratic candidates that use name-calling but ignore Republicans’ use of it
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Several new & extended health programs were included in the December spending bill with little debate
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With the 2021-2022 Legislative session wrapped up, Congress passed 13 pieces of landmark legislation. Only 5 of the 13 can be considered bipartisan under the traditional definition (majority support of both from both parties in at least one house).
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Major laws were passed with bipartisan majorities last session. Major lawmaking has recently been more bipartisan under Republican presidents (78% under Trump, 66% Obama, 77% W. Bush, 69% Clinton, 92% under H.W.) but that was after a long period of bipartisan laws
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My paper, “The Politics of Respectability and Black Americans’ Punitive Attitudes,” is now available for first view at .
cambridge.org/core/journals/
The piece is #OpenAccess, so no paywall!
I hope you’ll read it, assign it, and cite it.
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#OpenAccess from @apsrjournal -
The Politics of Respectability and Black Americans’ Punitive Attitudes - ow.ly/oWnU50Mw9Hi
- @hakeemjefferson
#FirstView
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In 2013, the government shutdown deadline was timed before the debt limit deadline, allowing House Republicans to carry out the threat & surrender later when they got nothing. No such safety valve this time.
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Even macrotargeting often doesn't work, meaning swing voters see partisan fundraising messages that are not well-suited to persuasion
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Fundraising messages are not just being targeted to base partisans, but are reaching swing voters and members of the opposing party
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Out of 943 pre-industrial ethnolinguistic groups, a society’s degree of market interactions is associated with the cultural salience of prosocial behaviour, interpersonal trust, universalist moral values & moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger
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Because of a 2015 trigger, one of the major policy changes under the new Democratic majority in Michigan may be an income tax cut. A recall over taxes cost Democrats their Senate majority 40 years ago & they haven't had it since--plus there is lots of $
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Evidence for the political globalization trilemma: it is hard for a country to have international integration, national sovereignty, & democratic politics
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Since Republicans won real concessions in the 2011 debt ceiling fight, they see it as real leverage. & Democrats see that as a mistake not to repeat (especially since they have won each time since)
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Comparing the data reported here to historical data from the 2020 EAVS shows that mail ballot rejections went up but only barely so, likely due to design changes in voter facing education materials & slightly elevated mail ballot usage compared to 2018, post 2020
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