Political Reality – Details, episodes & analysis

Our daily lives seem increasingly overwhelmed by polarization, misinformation and dubious culture wars while we face countless serious problems that require thoughtful and evidence-based solutions. To move forward we need a shared reality of facts and reason with an equally shared dedication to democracy and fairness. The Political Reality podcast is here to fill that void, diving into how politics and governments work, how to make them work better, how to navigate the dizzying world of political information, and how to better understand and approach the “other side”.  We can find a shared political reality, if we are willing.

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com How do you measure democracy? Are these standards reasonable, onerous, empirical, propagandistic, unscientific or quantifiable?

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com How do we quantify misinformation? Thank you to Prof. Joshua A. Tucker for joining us on this episode about Misinformation.

Full Episode https://www.patreon.com/posts/can-we-vote-our-151099132 https://patreon.com/politicalreality Further Reading & Resources on Voting Theory 📘 1. Kenneth Arrow's amazing 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179316/social-choice-and-individual-values/ a. A good writeup of the basics of the math if you don't want to buy a book: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/ 🧠 2. Arrow's 1950 paper introducing the idea (this paper is magnificent and you simply must read it): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/256963 a. Non-paywalled version: https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/meetings/mathofranking/ref/arrow.pdf 🔄 3. A nice primer on Condorcet's Paradox: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/14-75-political-economy-and-economic-development-fall-2012/a9fd8e5ab75a325016094e6bbe625b2a_MIT14_75F12_Lec12.pdf a. Even more on the math of voting systems: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/ 🗳️ 4. Early work on approval voting by Steve Brams, a leading thinker on it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/approval-voting/7CE5DEEE235794B0B12F76ADAE621482 a. Video of Brams talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZiS3U7EG0M b. Uh oh! It's a video from forever ago of Andrea interviewing Brams about approval voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAlxoW8WLX4 🏛️ 5. Some prominent advocacy groups on voting system reform: a. Approval voting: https://electionscience.org/ b. Ranked-choice voting: https://fairvote.org/ 🎓 6. Political science professor Lindsey Cormack speaking (admittedly briefly in these clips) about some tradeoffs around Ranked-Choice Voting (sneak preview, she'll be a guest on the show in the not-so-distant future; her instagram @howtoraiseacitizen is also a great resource on civics, politics, and current events (e.g., the SAVE act; more on that soon, too)): a. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLGXzYVMOyX/?hl=en b. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPkrogss5K/?hl=en

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com Follow Tom: Tom Pepinsky’s website with links to his research & books: https://tompepinsky.com Tom’s blog: https://tompepinsky.com/blog His substack: https://tompepinsky.substack.com/ Selected books and peer-reviewed works by Tom relevant to this episode: Recent paper on authoritarianism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2020.1775589 Recent paper on voting in authoritarian vs. democratic systems: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/voting-in-authoritarian-elections/1C066CD75F6F070930181135B288F632 Book on global challenges to democracy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-challenges-to-democracy/C50D0AC769FF0AA2C62DA9337F2C03E6 Covid paper we briefly referenced: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249596 Book based on his research on partisanship and Covid: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691218991/pandemic-politics Selected essays by Tom relevant to this episode: Preventing a slide into authoritarianism in the US: https://www.vox.com/politics/477317/donald-trumps-ego-democracy-authoritarianism Crucial characteristics of fascism: https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/03/berman-on-fascism/ An absolutely fantastic “mini syllabus” on how to make sense of the Trump administration through a comparative political science lens: https://tompepinsky.com/2016/12/21/comparative-politics-and-the-trump-administration/ US’s lost leadership in East Asia: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/02/a-united-states-that-is-disintegrating-and-no-longer-a-leader-in-asia/ Life in authoritarian states: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump Working papers by Tom relevant to this episode: Democratic backsliding: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5363315 Biased learning from elections: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/q9zpm_v2 Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

Full Audio episode available on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-polarization-149962215 Full Video episode available on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/149974348 Many of the empirical trends mentioned come from the (still a favorite!) American National Election Studies dataset: Party identity (including strength of party identity) Affective polarization (specifically shown here as the gap between attitudes towards in-group and out-group ideologies) Trust in government index  Public opinion on LGBTQ laws  Public opinion on abortion Public opinion on government spending The observation of “party sorting” was initially made by political scientists Morris Fiorina. It’s most extensively written about in his book Unstable Majorities, but you can read some other writings here and here. For further reading, see also Matthew Levendusky’s book The Partisan Sort A fantastic overview of the research on affective polarization is in this review article An interesting example of a recent application of using affective polarization to make sense of public opinion during Covid is here (we didn’t reference it; I just think it’s cool — and it’s a preview of our guest for the next episode!). I also wrote about all this in The Daily Beast, though I did not write the headline and would never actually sound that confident about anything.

The graph on total immigration numbers vs. percentage of the US population is from the Migration Policy Institute. Evidence that the percentage of immigrants in the US peaked recently, but is in the ballpark of an earlier wave is from Pew Research. (n.b. I may have said in the episode that this was in 2023 or 24, when actually it was January 2025, more recent than I realized. I don't know if that matters!)  In the episode I mentioned the Deportation Data Project.  You can explore their ICE data here.  And read more about the FOIA requests/challenges around getting this data here. I also specifically mentioned my favorite public opinion dataset (which I will likely reference a lot in this show!), which is the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset. I also recently wrote about some of these trends in an article for The Preamble, a digital magazine about US politics from Sharon McMahon. You’ll see some of the charts we talked about in the episode as well as links to other sources, particularly various additional Pew Research data, in the article.

Show Notes coming soon.