“Pollsters and pundits” has become a dismissive epithet in modern politics. Pollsters, at least, deserve much better.
Author: Scott Keeter | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president’s words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda … [ Read more ]
Author: Megan Garber | Source: The Atlantic (April 29, 2025) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Concepts, Life & Society, News | Media | Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Truth | Right | Wrong
An excerpt from the book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The Atlantic (February 6, 2012) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Max Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms…
The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” … [ Read more ]
Author: Jonathan Rauch | Source: The Atlantic (February 24, 2025) | Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy, Trump
Populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.
Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems … [ Read more ]
Author: David French | Source: The New York Times (February 9, 2025) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Trump
Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential.
[…]
Middle managers, able to plan and coordinate production independently of elite-executive control, shared not just the … [ Read more ]
Author: Daniel Markovits | Source: The Atlantic (February2020) | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.
The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.
The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
As the Republican Party evolves from a party focused on individual liberty and limits on government power to a party that more fully embraces government control of the economy and morality, it is reversing many of its previous stances on free speech in public universities, in public education, and in private corporations. Driven by a combination of partisan animosity and public fear, it is embracing … [ Read more ]
Author: David French | Source: The Atlantic (April 11, 2022) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, Politics & Public Policy
Since the 1950s, political scientists have theorized that political polarization—increased numbers of “political partisans” who view the world with an ideological bias—is associated with an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world.
But little is known about the biological mechanisms through which such biased perceptions arise.
To investigate that question, scientists measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans … [ Read more ]
Authors: Corrie Pikul-Brown, David J. Halpern, Jeroen van Baar, Oriel FeldmanHall | Source: Futurity (May 14, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.
Risk Compensation
One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]
Author: Zeynep Tufekci | Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more … [ Read more ]
Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Motivation, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
The divide between urban and rural voters is growing everywhere: from New York City to farm towns.
Authors: Ian Chipman, Jonathan Rodden | Source: Stanford University (May 2, 2017) | Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will set off tectonic shifts in the American political landscape not seen since the civil-rights movement—or perhaps even the Civil War.
Author: Jeffrey Rosen | Source: The Atlantic (June2006) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Law | Legal, Politics & Public Policy
Logic is the bedrock of pretty much all human knowledge. As such, philosophers have killed many trees over the centuries, analyzing and determining the principles that define logic and reason. Their ambition has been to determine what we can know to be true and what we cannot know to be true.
What most people don’t realize is that logical fallacies—that is, errors in judgment and reasoning—are … [ Read more ]
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Thought | Inquiry
By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal—indeed, it was the most unequal society in the advanced democratic world. The top 20 percent of households earned 56 percent of the nation’s income and commanded an astonishing 83 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even more striking, the top one … [ Read more ]
Author: Ray Boshara | Source: The Atlantic (January2003) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance.
[…]
Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.
[…]
We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: … [ Read more ]
Author: George Packer | Source: The Atlantic (June 8, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy
A prominent historian ponders the long-term legacy of the elusive Bush Doctrine.
Author: John Lewis Gaddis | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, Politics & Public Policy
Here are two interesting videos produced by Vox covering the history of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Source: Vox | Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy
Emily Ekins has identified five different types of voters that elected Donald Trump as president. Do these groups represent a shift in American politics?
Author: Emily Ekins | Source: Libertarianism.org (July 14, 2017) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
After World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book … [ Read more ]
Author: Heather Cox Richardson | Source: Facebook (February 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy