Thomas Edsall has a good review of some recent research on polarization in the New York Times today: The strength of a voter’s identity as a Democrat or Republican drives political engagement more than personal gain. Better educated voters more readily form “identity centric†political commitments to their party of choice, which goes a long… Continue reading Ideology and Education
The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings
James Forman, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize last week for his book Locking Up Our Own. It is well-deserved. That book–and his earlier work wrangling with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow–shows the ways that we have arrived at the wicked problem of mass incarceration through something much harder to disdain than evil scheming by distant elites. We… Continue reading The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings
Going Negative: Angry Ads and Negative Partisanship
It’s been twenty years since Ansolabehere and Iyengar published Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate.
Man AND Rabbit: Naturalizing the Ethics of Belief
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics
(Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)