Not Another Politics Podcast

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

For better or worse, one of the biggest stories in US politics today is the detection of election fraud, or in many cases the lack of election fraud. But determining whether fraud happened in an election can be difficult, even while proving the validity of elections for some has become increasingly important. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could just plug a set of data from an election into a toolkit that could give us an answer if fraud occurred? Well, one political scientist from the University of Michigan, Walter Mebane believes he may have developed just such a toolkit. It’s called “election forensics”. Much like machine learning algorithms, when tested in the field it does seem to perform fantastically well, but figuring out exactly how it works can be a complicated web to untangle. We give it a shot on this episode.

As we approach the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, we wanted to reflect on where we are as a country and whether politics are really as polarized as they seem. Our co-host Will Howell recently joined another University of Chicago podcast called Big Brains to discuss these very questions. We're going to share that episode with you this week, we hope you enjoy it, and look forward to being back with a new episode in a few weeks.

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

We took some time off to enjoy the holiday with our families, but in the wake of the 2024 mid-terms, we’re going to re-share this crucial episode and relevant episode. When it comes to polarization, most people in American politics blame the voters. But much of the political science data suggests most voters are actually moderates. So, where are all the moderate politicians? In a new book, “Who Wants To Run?: How The Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”, Stanford political scientist Andrew Hall argues that the reason we don’t have more moderate politicians is actually quite simple…there just aren’t any incentives for them to run.