Not Another Politics Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Ever thought about how your college degree might sway your political leanings? Voters with and without college degrees drifting apart, especially on issues like economics, social values, and foreign policy, but what's driving this shift, and how are party positions influencing voters across different education levels?

A new paper from University of Pennsylvania’s William Marble, “What Explains Educational Realignment? An Issue Voting Framework for Analyzing Electoral Coalitions” gives some surprising answers to these questions and challenges the assumptions we often hear in the media.

We talk about it every election cycle…how can we get higher voter turnout? As part of the Center for Effective Government’s primer series focusing on the scholarship covering the pros and cons of different government reforms, University of Chicago Policy Professor Christopher Berry examined whether changing the timing of elections can result in higher turnout.

But he also explored a much more contentious and complex question. Does higher voter turnout result in better policies? Is it possible that a higher turnout often results in less knowledgeable voters pushing elections in a direction that results in worse outcomes?

How do we know if our democracy is healthy? For political scientist, the answer often comes down to things we can measure like responsiveness to voter’s wishes. But is that really the right thing to measure?

There are two camps in this debate. The empiricists want to focus on what and how we can measure things like the health of our democracy, often focusing on indicators like responsiveness, while the normative theorists want to focus on what we even mean…and what we should mean…by democratic health.

If you’ve listened to our show before, you can probably guess that we fall more into the empiricists camp, but we wanted to bring on someone who could challenge our assumptions.

Andrew Sabl is a political scientist from the University of Toronto and the author of “The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide” in which he argues that the empiricists need to pay more attention to what they’re measuring and why.

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!

On this "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 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!

Every Presidential election, we talk about “getting out the vote”. But what really works and what doesn’t in terms of getting people to go to the polls? And how will the coronavirus pandemic alter those efforts? We speak to one political scientist who has conducted more studies into “get out the vote” campaigns than any other.

Professor Donald Green from Columbia University shares his research about what works in terms of getting out the vote, and how we expect things to be different this years due to COVID-19.

We’re heading into the homestretch of the 2020 election and, as October draws near, we want to take a research focused look at the famed “October Surprise.” It’s a political notion that says, if you want to damage a presidential candidate with a political bombshell you’ve discovered, you should wait until just before the election to release the accusations. But why should candidates wait? What do October Surprises reveal about the politics of scandal? And what can voters can infer from them?

A paper by Gabriele Gratton, a professor at The University of New South Wales in Australia, gives counter intuitive insights into when you should drop a bombshell if you want to cause the maximum amount of damage to your political opponent. We discuss how this research could change the way we view “October surprises” and the 2020 election.

Link to paper: http://www.restud.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MS23024manuscript.pdf 

In November, Kamala Harris could be elected the first woman to ever serve as president or vice president. Why are women so underrepresented in the highest levels of government? And what does this imply about the women who do reach those levels? 

In this episode, we discuss a paper from Professors Christopher Berry at the University of Chicago and Sarah Anzia at UC Berkeley that attempts to indirectly assess discrimination against women in the electoral process by testing whether the women who are elected perform better once in office. 

We discuss their study, alternative explanations of their findings, and implications for the 2020 presidential election and a potential Biden-Harris administration.

Link to paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00512.x

How is it that in a Democracy with massive inequality, where the poor have just as much voting power as the rich, do the wealthy continue to get what they want politically? It’s a question that’s troubled political thinkers for a long time.    Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have an answer in their new book “Let Them Eat Tweets: How The Right Rules In An Age of Extreme Inequality”. On this episode, we tackle that question and their answer.   Part 1: How did the plutocrats take over the Republican Party: 16:00   Part 2: Are the voters getting duped or do their preferences really align with the wealthy: 20:20   Part 3: Is Donald Trump a natural continuation of Republican strategy?: 34:20