John Sides

In an effort to control for confounding factors that might affect the relative propensities for women and men to enter politics, we take the question of candidate emergence into the laboratory. We find evidence that women are election averse while men are not. This difference does not arise from disparities in abilities, risk aversion, or […]

A couple days ago, John Cluverius noted that public opinion moves in the opposite direction as policy is moving.  We tend to assume that the party in power has public opinion on its side—after all, that’s why they won, right?—but in reality the public usually shifts away from them.  The public is a thermostat. In […]

How salient is race? I would say the ability of the United States to go from legal segregation a half century ago to the election of a black president suggests there is enormous elasticity in the American political system, and that the country has the capacity to deal with what it now faces, both inside […]

There can be no doubt that the covered jurisdictions differ, as a group, from the noncovered jurisdictions in their rates of  racially polarized voting. There can also be no doubt that voting the covered jurisdictions is becoming more, not less, polarized over time. From a new paper by Nathaniel Persily, Charles Stewart, and Stephen Ansolabehere.  It […]

Does exposure to the stock market in legislators’ personal investment portfolios affect their vote choices? Do personal financial interests matter as much or more than the typical predictors of legislative decision-making such as party and constituency? I argue that legislator self-interest predicts more than just reelection-seeking behavior. Self-interest also suggests that legislators seek to maintain […]

Ron Brownstein: With his suddenly aggressive second-term agenda, President Obama is recasting the Democratic Party around the priorities of the growing coalition that reelected him—and, in the process, reshaping the debate with the GOP in ways that will reverberate through 2016 and beyond. On issues from gay rights to gun control, immigration reform, and climate […]

Kindred Winecoff, himself a political scientist, writes in reaction to an earlier post: This is an opportunity for the social sciences to demonstrate their value by making a clear, coherent argument. Simply pointing to research on topics of possible public interest (as Sides does) is not enough… it must be accompanied by an argument that […]

The graph is from Danny Hayes, writing over at Wonkblog.  He concludes: But the media tend to be reactive, “indexing” their coverage according to the political debate happening within Washington. The surest way for an issue to stay in the news is for politicians to fight about it.  (It doesn’t hurt when the president mentions […]