John Sides

There are no end of lamentations about what voters do—and often do not—know about politics and current events.    Could the solution be waiting in the welcoming arms of Big Bird?  Could watching public broadcasting, which tends to feature more substantive “hard” news than does commercial broadcasting, make people more knowledgeable about politics? In a […]

In the Los Angeles Times, Washington bureau chief David Lauter reviews Lynn Vavreck’s and my book on the election, The Gamble (coming soon!), and Dan Balz’s just-released Collision 2012.  Part of what has gotten attention in Balz’s book is his revelations about attempts to recruit Chris Christie to run.  Here’s how Lauter sets this up […]

We study the coverage of U.S. political scandals by U.S. newspapers during the past decade. Using automatic keyword-based searches we collected data on 32 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. We find that Democratic-leaning newspapers—i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections—provide relatively more coverage of scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals […]

Nate Silver’s imminent departure from the New York Times to ABC and ESPN —see details in the links within this Jack Shafer post—has elicited stories of hostility to Silver within the Times newsroom.  The Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, writes: His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism […]

Nationalism is widely viewed as a force for interstate violence, but does it really have an important effect on state aggression that cannot be explained by strategic concerns? I provide strong evidence that it does using regression discontinuity analysis. I take advantage of the fact that many countries experience a surge of nationalism when they […]

Once the Senate gun control bill died in April, so did the story. That is Danny Hayes, over at Wonkblog. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

The handful of studies on Latino party identification tends to emphasize its variability across elections as a result of the candidate position-taking on key issues, and the fact that parental socialization of American politics is nonexistent for immigrants (Wong 2000; Alvarez and Bedolla 2003; Nicholson and Segura 2005; Uhlaner and Garcia 2005).  A common understanding […]

Now, perhaps there are unforeseen events that will permanently help the GOP among Latinos and that have nothing to do with immigration reform politics in 2013.  But if I’m the GOP, what I’d bet on is this: “We’ll be more likely to win presidential elections if we win more Latino votes.”  (And if that seems […]

As the criticism of our current state of journalism and the current state of journalism education mounts, we ask a simple question: Could political science graduates do a better job of providing political reporting than graduates with journalism degrees? Although we do not test this question empirically, a review of the extant literature suggests that […]