Seth Masket

Chief Justice John Roberts, during arguments over the Voting Rights Act earlier in the week: Is it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North? Well, here’s what the 2008 American National Election Study had to say: For more, see Sides, Bouie, and Valentino and Sears. […]

I’m sympathetic to films and TV shows that seek to dramatize politics. There’s real drama in politics, of course, but not all of it makes for good public theater, which leaves filmmakers with the difficult task of inventing drama where it doesn’t necessarily exist. Example: In episode 4 of “House of Cards” (U.S. version), Rep. […]

Republicans and Democrats don’t just think differently, they actually use their brains differently: We explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity […]

What happens to the electorate when you tighten up rules for voting? Does everyone have a harder time voting, or are some groups of voters affected more than others? We got some evidence on this question in Colorado recently. For several election cycles, Colorado has provided mail-in ballots automatically to those who have registered as […]

Today marks the beginning of my gig as a regular blogger for Pacific Standard. I’ll be doing a weekly column there on, you know, politics ‘n stuff. (Thanks to Marc Herman for helping to make this happen.) Anyway, my first piece is a discussion about campaign effects, related to this blog post I wrote a […]

[There is] a gross mismatch between the corporate world we inhabit and the liberal individualist frames we use to interpret and address this world. It is commonplace, for example, to describe the United States as modern, liberal, democratic, market oriented, and individualistic. Yet the corporations that are the setting of its workaday world and portions […]

In a recent interview, director Steven Soderbergh suggests that Washington could learn a thing or two from Hollywood: One thing I do know from making art is that ideology is the enemy of problem-solving. Nobody sits on a film set and says, “No, you can’t use green-screen VFX to solve that because I’m Catholic.” There’s […]

Last fall, I wrote about Barack Obama’s field office advantage in the swing states. The final tally shows that, across all the states, Obama had 786 field offices; Romney had 284. With the election behind us, we can now assess whether that made any difference in the election’s outcome. Location of all Obama (blue) and […]

Nate Silver has an interesting piece attempting to forecast how historians will ultimately rank Obama, based on what we know about his presidency thus far. I don’t know if he intended this, but Silver did an excellent job undermining the value of these rankings altogether. Reasonable people, of course, may disagree about whether a president was […]

Praise where praise is due: the White House has issued a response to the petition calling upon the U.S. to construct a Death Star. (I like to think that this is the sort of thing I would have been tasked with writing when I worked in White House correspondence in the 90s — I was […]