John Sides

A leading media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University. The study finds that PolitiFact.com has rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President Obama’s second term. Republicans continue […]

Despite it being the constitutional amendment that most altered the design of the federal government, and despite recent efforts by many prominent figures to repeal it, little is known about why the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913. Existing histories of why the Constitution was amended to require direct elections for U.S. Senators, rather than having […]

The senior senator from Arizona urged this body to trust the Republicans. Let me be clear, I don’t trust the Republicans. I don’t trust the Democrats and I think a whole lot of Americans likewise don’t trust the Republicans or the Democrats because it is leadership in both parties that has got us into this […]

We welcome this guest post from Stephen Benedict Dyson. ***** Star Trek Into Darkness, the number one movie in America, is rife with political resonance. Political scientists have taken to analyzing popular cultural entertainment, and Star Trek, in its classic and current incarnations, is perhaps the most fertile ground of all for this. It was […]

We welcome this guest post by political scientist Michael Miller, author of the forthcoming Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections, and How it Can Work in the Future.  For more on this topic, see this this post. ***** Quite a lot has been written in the last week about inappropriate IRS scrutiny of conservative […]

We welcome this guest post from Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute. ***** May 2013 is only half over, but it has been an eventful month for same-sex marriage legislation: Rhode Island, Delaware, and Minnesota all legalized same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states with such laws to 12. […]

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this […]

Much of politics is about collective action, whereby groups of people need to cooperate in order to produce an outcome.  One of the biggest challenges is getting people to cooperate in providing a public good, which by its nature can be shared by everyone regardless of whether they’ve cooperated in the first place. One way […]

A perennial and crucial question—one intimately tied to the national security interests of the United States—is how to design political institutions that can mitigate ethnic conflict.  This issue was front-and-center when the United States worked to establish new Iraqi political institutions after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (see, for example, here).  The conundrum is this: […]

The fifth largest city in Jordan is the Zaatari refugee camp, where approximately 175,000 Syrians fleeing their country’s war now live.  This is but a fraction of the 500,000 Syrians who have fled to Jordan, and an even smaller fraction of Syrians who have fled their own homes and now live in other countries or elsewhere […]