In a new research paper published in the Journal of Politics, we consider how race-centered coursework influences public opinion among college students. This is important because college student bodies have diversified over the past few decades. As such, many colleges and universities are offering courses on race and ethnicity to meet student demand, especially in response to contemporary events, such as protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020. There has also been pushback against educational initiatives that center race and diversity, with several states restricting such activities at public universities in recent years.
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Local newspapers were once a staple of American political life. Information is the lifeblood of democracy, and newspapers have long been critical providers of information to the public. Founding figures of the American democratic experiment described newspapers as essential for ensuring that government is responsive and accountable: Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s third President, wrote that given a choice between “government without newspapers or newspapers without government,” he “would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
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When a president nominates someone to lead a federal agency, the confirmation process is often described as a negotiation between the White House and the Senate. That view is incomplete. Organized interests are also part of the process, and their influence can begin well before many nominees ever take office.
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In recent years, voting by mail has been the subject of numerous lawsuits and attacks that often claim the process gives Democratic nominees and legislative bills an edge. Are there merits to this claim, and what are the actual causal effects of sending ballots to all registered voters? In the paper, we take advantage of a unique situation in Southern California that allows us to pin down the causal effects convincingly.
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Many of the variables social scientists care about most change over time. We typically build models to explain shifts in average levels, such as how approval ratings rise or fall in response to economic change, or how GDP grows or contracts in response to political events. Yet sometimes what matters is not the average level of a variable but how erratic it is.
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According to the compensatory theory of tax fairness, people support raising taxes on the rich when they perceive them to have benefited from unequal state action. This idea has been used to explain the historically high top marginal tax rates following the two world wars. In this context, while the poor were risking their lives for their country, many argued that the rich were not sacrificing as much —and some were even benefiting from the war industry. Higher taxes were thus seen as a way to compensate for this unequal treatment by the state and ensure that the war burden was shared more fairly across society.
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The conventional story of economic voting is simple: when the economy does well, incumbent governments get re-elected; when it is in decline, they get punished. But advancements in the economic voting literature suggest that the compleat economic voter is multidimensional, with valence (i.e., the assessment of economic performance) as only one dimension, alongside economic policy position and patrimony (i.e., ownership of assets).
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People are interested in political distrust because we normally assume that it is caused by poor government performance and that it has negative consequences, especially for political participation. In this paper, we challenge these two assumptions.
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Political extremism is often attributed to voter anger and broader structural socioeconomic conditions. From this perspective, efforts to counter extremist movements may appear futile, since such groups are seen as deeply embedded in the contexts from which they arise. But is this necessarily the case? To address this question, we examine the Papal condemnation of an influential far-right movement in interwar France.
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One of the strongest findings in political behavior research is that people often take cues from their party when forming opinions. If their party supports a proposal, they are more likely to support it too. If the opposing party supports it, they often move the other way. In a polarized age, that pattern matters. It suggests that citizens may sometimes respond less to what a policy does than to who backs it.
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