The Science of Politics

Polarized politics is not leaving much room for agreement on economic regulation, even as inequality and business power grow. But Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee find that corporate scandals can often mobilize the public and wider interests to overcome big business power, including after the financial crisis. They argue that this kind of populism can be a useful form of backlash to break through in our calcified political system.

Laura Field, political theorist and author of Furious Minds, maps the intellectual currents behind the MAGA new right. She traces Straussian roots, national conservatism, Christian nationalist theory, and patriotic education efforts. Short takes cover how theorists linked with online movements, influenced GOP institutions, and what this means for the future of liberal democracy.

Carlos Algarra, political scientist at Claremont Graduate University who studies congressional elections, explains what drives midterm outcomes. He discusses long-run generic ballot trends, how presidential approval and shifts in policy mood predict congressional vote swings. He also covers why the generic ballot maps to House seats more cleanly than the Senate and how redistricting and candidate quality can alter the math.

Legislators spend considerable time dialing for dollars to support their party, even if they themselves are not in electoral danger. That helps them move up the party leadership ladder, but does not help them achieve their policy goals. Michael Kistner finds that when legislators spend a lot of time raising money, they spend less making policy. By rewarding fundraising, parties miss out on both diverse leaders and effective legislators. But states that reform their campaign finance system are able to make more landmark policies.

Andy Hall, a Stanford political scientist who used AI tools like Claude Code to extend and audit a vote-by-mail study. He describes using agents to plan and run modular replications, where they shine at data collection and coding but sometimes miscoded or missed cases. He explores best practices, risks of overconfident AI reviewers, dynamic papers that reveal fragility, and what massively faster research could enable.

Some Americans prefer obedient, respectful, and well-mannered children and others prefer independent, curious, and self-reliant kids. And that divide is a surprisingly broad window into contemporary political views and partisan choices. How did we become increasingly divided by our preferences for order over independence? Christopher Federico and Christopher Weber find that authoritarian values, measured by these parenting preferences, increasingly structure Americans’ attitudes toward social and cultural issues and their political predispositions. Now that the parties divide on cultural concerns, especially in the Trump era, these attitudes increasingly drive White Americans’ partisanship and vote choices.

Do rich white Americans always get their way in policymaking? Or does it matter who is in charge? Agustin Markarian finds that different groups see their policy preferences better represented depending on which party is in power. White Americans get what they want more under Republican control—and not only because white voters are mostly Republicans. In the Senate, Republicans with higher Black populations also fail to represent their views on their congressional votes. Whether it comes to policy outcomes or legislative voting, different groups win under different parties.

Despite calls for politics to return to kitchen table economic issues, the culture war rages on. That could be a product of the distinct incentives facing politicians, who have to win elections, and media actors, who just have to keep your attention. Aakaash Rao and Shakked Noy find that cable news outlets talk more about culture war issues while candidates favor economics. Every minute cable news spends covering the culture war, they gain audience from people who would otherwise prefer entertainment. When they talk economics, people switch channels. And where cable news penetrated more, people started seeing crime, immigration, and race and gender as more important than economics—and candidates eventually shifted their behavior to match. It's not just about the part cable news played in the rise of the culture war but also about how actors seeking to mobilize rather than win converts might be the source of our wider polarizing shifts.

Donald Trump has taken extraordinary actions to redirect or ignore congressional appropriations, from dismantling foreign aid to making the Education Department a ghost town. But how unique are Trump’s efforts to avoid spending when he does not favor it? Kevin Angell compares what Congress appropriated to what agencies actually spent over decades, finding that presidents have long moved spending toward their preferences. Even after impoundment controls, presidents found ways of not spending money they never requested from Congress. Trump is more blatant and could be more extreme, but administrations have long used their tools to obtain some power of the purse from Congress.

How unique is Donald Trump’s trajectory as a president born of backlash? What should we make of Trump following Barack Obama? Julia Azari finds that backlash presidents like Trump tend to follow transformative presidents like Barack Obama who represent changes to the American racial order. And the backlash presidents commonly face impeachment as they are seen as transgressive figures. She finds parallels in the previous pairings of Andrew Johnson after Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon after Lyndon Johnson. It puts Trump, the American presidency, and our racial politics in useful historical context.