John Sides

A reader, Jeff, emailed me and wrote: Observation: while too much press coverage ignores poli sci insights and exaggerates the significance of winning the daily news cycle, role of campaigns, etc., I think a lot of non poli sci people have taken to over-compensating and making stronger claims on behalf of the poli sci than […]

It’s possible that when elections occur may affect the power of political actors. It is an established fact that off-cycle elections attract lower voter turnout than on-cycle elections. I argue that the decrease in turnout that accompanies off-cycle election timing creates a strategic opportunity for organized interest groups. Members of interest groups with a large […]

The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 1965 […]

In this Politico story on Republican women in the House, Rep. Kristi Noem of South Dakota says “I definitely think the women are as conservative as the men are.”  Over at Rule 22, Nate Birkhead put this to the test: The axes capture estimates of ideology based on roll call votes in the current Congress.  […]

Inbox Influence is a new tool from the Sunlight Foundation that allows you to see the political contributions of the people and organizations that are mentioned in emails you receive. This easy-to-use tool can be used for researching influence background on corporate correspondence, adding context to newspaper headlines or discovering who is behind political fundraising […]

A reader forwards this Washington Post piece and asks whether fiery rhetoric—e.g., Michele Bachmann’s saying that Obama has “anti-American views”—is an effective tactic for raising money.  Here’s how the Post’s reporters, Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam, describe the phenomenon: Here’s how it works: An up-and-coming politician blurts out something incendiary, provocative or otherwise controversial. The […]

The graph is from this analysis by Adam Bonica and Kevin Collins.  They write: The upper panel plots the proportion of funds raised from donations of $500 or less (including unitemized contributions) against candidate ideology. As is evident, more conservative candidates, particularly those affiliated with the tea party, raise a greater proportion of their funds […]

Conventional wisdom suggests that the best way to persuade Americansto support changes in health care policy is to appeal to theirself-interest — particularly to concerns about their economicand health security. An alternative strategy, framing problemsin the health care system to emphasize inequalities, could also,however, mobilize public support for policy change by activatingunderlying attitudes about the […]

Many have attributed anti-American sentiment within Arab countries to a highly negative information environment propagated by transnational Arab satellite TV news channels such as Al-Jazeera. However, theoretical models and empirical evidence evaluating the linkages between media exposure and opinion about the United States remains scant. Drawing on theories of media effects, identity, and public opinion, […]

This is a long post, and I realize that I’ve beat this topic nearly to death, but stick with me. Following on James Fallows’ post about the recent attention to Donald Trump’s potential candidacy,  Conor Friedersdorf had a thoughtful post this week about why press coverage of campaigns (and politics) is so bad.  Here is […]