The Science of Politics

Candidates celebrate when their campaigns are funded by small contributions. Small donors are playing far greater roles in American politics but they are not having the positive envisioned effects. Ray La Raja and Zach Albert find that small donors are just as advantaged, partisan, and extreme as larger donors, but more impulsive, empowering show horse celebrities and norm breakers over consensus-...

We fear that legislatures are gridlocked and performative, rather than focused on actually passing new laws. But some legislators are consistently more effective than others, at the state and national levels. Can we train legislators to be more effective at advancing their bills? Mackenzie Dobson finds that training programs for state legislators don’t make them more effective than their untrained...

Elite polarization may be helping young people sort out their politics but it could also make them misperceive how the other side lives. Delia Baldassarri finds that millennial and gen Z are now aligning their issue positions with partisanship as much as older generations. They are choosing their party more based on cultural and moral issues and, up to now, that’s been helping Democrats. But parti...

The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision is upending the midterm election and raising concerns about its role in democratic backsliding. Thomas Keck finds that the Court has rarely helped maintain democratic guardrails in threatening periods. But the Roberts Court had been showing a mixed record until recently. Albert Rivero finds that election law cases at the Supreme Court lead to more party-l...

Economic inequality is high and rising, without much political response. Most stay that's because our political institutions overrepresent the views of the rich. But Andrew Taylor finds that poor Americans don’t prioritize solving inequality or redistributive policy. They want their representatives to focus more on distributive politics and constituency service and that’s what they do. It's a corr...

Trust in American elections has declined since President Trump failed to concede the 2020 election. But voters do have real concerns about electoral institutions born of not knowing the process well. Jennifer Gaudette finds that election officials can increase trust in elections by informing citizens of basic facts, such as that election machines are not connected to the Internet. There are partis...

Rural America has moved toward strong Republican voting even though Republican governance helps explain worse health outcomes in rural areas, from hospital closures to opioid policies. Michael Shepherd finds that rural areas disproportionately suffer from Republican policies but Republicans successfully blame Democrats for worse health outcomes, especially when Democratic policies can be framed as...

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...

Donald Trump has not been a favorite of university professors or public intellectuals, but he does have a base in some elements of political theory. What are their ideas and did they help bring us Trumpism? Laura Field tracks the intellectual parts of the movement and their relationship to mainstream political figures and activists. From the Claremont Institute to national conservatism, they were...

The 2026 election will decide who controls the House and Senate for the duration of Trump's presidency. Trump's approval is low and public opinion is moving against his policy ideas. The historical pattern suggests Democrats are on the way to big congressional gains. Carlos Algara studies 80 years of high-frequency data on generic ballot polls and election results. Presidential approval and the id...

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 di...

AI tool improvement is compounding fast enough for researchers to start using tools like Claude Code for real social science tasks. What are the early lessons from using AI to conduct research? Will it just mean more slop papers and slop reviewers? Or will it lower barriers to exploration, replication, and robustness, with findings accumulating and spreading faster? Andy Hall designed and executed...

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, m...

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 po...

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...

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 t...

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 pa...

A year before the midterms, quarterly fundraising reports are already reshuffling expectations and causing some candidates to drop out. And candidates are spending almost as much raising money as they collect. That’s because in congressional primaries and general elections, the top fundraiser still wins 92 percent of the time. Danielle Thomsen finds that candidates are raising money earlier and in...

Many thought the second Trump administration would feature a confrontation between a Supreme Court intent on limiting executive discretion and an empowered president flaunting the rules. Instead, the Supreme Court has largely acquiesced to Trump’s moves, using the shadow docket to overturn lower court actions limiting Trump, even those from Republican judges. Adam Bonica finds that Trump has sough...

Democrats are out of power in all three branches of government, uncompetitive in many states, and divided on how to prepare for 2026. What’s the path forward? Should the party refocus on economics over cultural issues? Moderate across the board? Or embrace the abundance agenda as their electoral and policymaking future?

Texas, California, and Missouri are moving forward with plans for mid-decade redistricting to gain partisan advantage—with other states threatening to follow. They are not hiding the motive: President Trump asked Texas to gain Republicans seats and Governor Newsom is saying he needs to retaliate. Just how much has gerrymandering gained the parties in Congress? And how much is likely to change now?...

President Trump has pressured and attacked the Federal Reserve and is now trying to replace governors. What are the consequences if the Fed is losing independence and moving toward presidential control? Cristina Bodea finds that the Fed was never the most independent and is becoming less so in the face of public pressure. That could make a normally conservative institution move toward enabling inf...

As the next AI cycle begins, state and national governments are trying to keep up. And AI policy now matters for energy, health, education, foreign, and economic development policy as well. What can we learn from the early AI legislation? Chinnu Parinandi finds that partisan alignments and institutional capacity shape where and how consumer protection versus economic development AI policies appear...

American students are falling behind while local school boards are preoccupied with culture war controversies. Is local democratic control of schools a detriment to improving student outcomes? Vlad Kogan finds that school boards regularly prioritize the needs of teachers and administrators over students. Elections are unrepresentative and sometimes partisan and drive schools to distraction. He dra...

The Republican Congress has quickly remade fiscal policy, with substantially more success than in Trump’s first term. How did they achieve so much more without compromise? How much will their routes around the filibuster matter for the decline of congressional appropriations? And are we setting up for a huge new step in presidential spending power: pocket rescissions? Molly Reynolds of the Brookin...