Not Another Politics Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Cory Clark, behavioral scientist and Associate Professor of Psychology at New College of Florida. We discuss her paper, “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors," which explores how controversial topics in science are perceived, debated, and sometimes suppressed, and the psychological dynamics of taboo beliefs and self-censorship in academia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is no political topic that can get people’s blood boiling quite like partisan gerrymandering. But what do we know about how effective it is and what the data shows about its outcomes?This week, we're re-releasing our conversation with Princeton political scientist Kosuke Imai about his paper, "Widespread Partisan Gerrymandering Mostly Cancels Nationally, But Reduces Electoral Competition.” He uses a novel methodological approach to try and document the effect of partisan gerrymandering. What he finds is surprising and may lead people who participate in it to re-think whether it’s worth the effort.Link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217322120 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when a political party nominates a candidate in its primary who is ideologically extreme? Do donors, especially those outside the party’s base, react — and if so, how? That question is explored in a new paper by Andy Christopher Wayne Myers, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. He uncovers how donors respond when a relative “moderate” is replaced by a more extreme nominee and if the force of donors is actually weaker than it once was. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

More than 25 percent of countries around the world are currently governed by populists, from Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, to Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and Donald Trump in the United States. Based on these findings, populism is at an all-time high, and taking a significant economic toll, according to a recent paper by Christoph Trebesch and his co-authors.Trebesch is Professor of Economics at Kiel University. He and his co-authors find that populism leads to slower economic growth, undermines democratic institutions, and can leave the country more vulnerable to future populist governments. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if most political science studies are too weak to find the effects they’re looking for? In this episode, we dig into a new paper by Vincent Arel-Bundock and colleagues that reveals a striking truth: quantitative political science is greatly underpowered. With thousands of tests analyzed, the authors show that many studies have only a one-in-ten chance of detecting real effects — and that even experts vastly overestimate the field’s strength.Arel-Bundock is Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. In his new paper, he concludes that methodologists greatly overestimate the statistical power of political science research. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.