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.

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com

How do we quantify misinformation?

Thank you to Prof. Joshua A. Tucker for joining us on this episode about Misinformation.

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com

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.