Not Another Politics Podcast

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, claims of widespread voter fraud have fueled political controversies and public distrust. But how credible are these claims?

In this episode, we sit down with political scientist Justin Grimmer to discuss his new paper “An Evaluation of Fraud Claims from the 2020 Trump Election Contests” which systematically debunks over 1,000 fraud allegations from the 2020 election. Grimmer and his co-author comb through the data, analyzing everything from accusations of underage voting to machine vote-switching. Are these claims grounded in reality, or are they just a tool for sowing doubt? Tune in as we dive into the data, the myths, and the facts about the integrity of American elections.

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?

In a recent paper by Washington University political scientist Michael Olson, he documents a very strange phenomenon. It seems that when legislators join committees, they’re voting record becomes less aligned with their constituents’ political preferences. The question is…why?

Could it be that being on a committee means they’re just better informed about what good policy really would be, or could it be that they’re nefariously colluding with their colleagues? We explore all these possibilities and more on this episode.

Since Biden’s debate performance, America’s political elite have been engaged in a debate. How much does a President really matter for effective government? If his administration seems to work fine, how much of an affect can a President have? At the same time, we important Supreme Court decisions that seem to be giving more power to Presidents which makes finding answers to these questions even more pressing.

Well, there is one famous political scientist who explored these questions long ago in one of the most well-known texts in the field “President Power and the Modern Presidents” by Richard Neustadt. It’s a book that sat bedside for several Presidents in the White House. It was meant to inform them about how they ought to exercise power and where they might actually be able to find power in a system that was stacked against them. It's worth taking stock of his argument and trying to make sense of both its elements and the extent to which it speaks to this president political moment.

Have you ever made a 311 call? This is a service provided by many cities that allows citizens to call in things like potholes, graffiti, fallen trees, ect. There is an assumption that many people have that requests made by white and more affluent neighborhoods probably get responded to faster. But is that accurate? 

In a recent paper, “Unequal Responsiveness in City Service Delivery: Evidence from 24 Million 311 Calls” Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow Derek Holliday uses a large an unique dataset to find some surprising answers. But what are the implications of these findings, and are they positive or concerning results?

Hello Not Another Politics Podcast listeners. We’re taking some much needed time off as the school year comes to a close; but with the elections right around the corner we still wanted to share some incredibly relevant and important political science research.

Every Presidential election, we talk about “getting out the vote”. But what really works in terms of getting people to go to the polls? 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.

And thanks to everyone who listened to our podcast this year. We don’t make money off this show, it’s a labor of love to make important scientific research interesting and accessible…but your support is crucial to helping us to continue that mission. The data shows that the number one way podcasts grow is through word of mouth. If you could please just tell a friend, a family member, co-worker to listen to our show it would help us immensely. Thanks again!

Hello Not Another Politics Podcast listeners. We’re taking some much needed time off as the school year comes to a close; but with the elections right around the corner we still wanted to share some incredibly relevant and important political science research. 

This week we’re resharing an episode all about October Surprises that has some counter intuitive insights that could become important during this election year. 

And thanks to everyone who listened to our podcast this year. We don’t make money off this show, it’s a labor of love to make important scientific research interesting and accessible, but your support is crucial to helping us to continue that mission. The data shows that the number one way podcasts grow is through word of mouth. If you could please just tell a friend, a family member, co-worker to listen to our show it would help us immensely. Thanks again!

The Supreme Court is supposed to be our non-political branch of government, making decisions solely on the constitutional soundness of laws. But in recent years it appears as though the Court has taken a shift to the right, most notably in the Dobbs decision in 2022. Which raises a question: does the public still the view the Court as legitimate?

Those are the questions explored in a new paper from UPenn political scientist Matthew Levendusky in a paper titled “Has the Supreme Court become just another political branch? Public perceptions of court approval and legitimacy in a post-Dobbs world”.

If the media is to be believed, the US public has a tenuous at best grasp on accurate political news. They’re either consuming disinformation and fake news on social media or following biasedly inaccurate news outlets. Either journalistic truth is as good as dead or we’re living in separate informational universes. But is this too alarmist, could the real story be more nuanced?

That’s what Columbia professor of economics Andrea Prat finds in his recent paper “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News”. But what are we to make of these results, and how do we square them with claims of political polarization?