Many thanks to @mattgrossmann.bsky.social for having me on the @niskanencenter.bsky.social #ScienceofPolitics podcast to talk '26 midterms for the U.S. Senate & House!
TLDR; battleground looks expanded for Senate Democrats compared to year ago thanks to candidate recruitment efforts. Take a listen!
Many Americans may believe that Democrats support science and Republicans don’t—but research suggests that although the Trump administration’s hostility toward science is real, it isn’t matched by the rest of the GOP's, Alexander Furnas and Dashun Wang write.
Democracy Dies in Snark-ness?
Oh man now you gotta make a recommendation
What do you make of the combination of that first abstract and the last one?
I mean, my read of the piece you're linking there was not really to dismiss political science out of hand, but rather to caution practitioners/candidates/policymakers that the empirical regularities political science observes are not self-executing. YMMV though fair enough.
I don't have a good sense of any of the current debate, but FWIW MattY remains the only Discourse-r who has explicitly referenced "lobbying as legislative subsidy" so I'm not sure I agree with that last characterization.... at least, not entirely.
Yeah - I guess the hope (or just, my hope) is that the result of all this is that it grows demand of some alternative districting/electoral system?
(and the reverse is also true I'm sure)
I know who needs to read this: political science does not require natural laws that apply unconditionally to be a science.
It needs human beings to not be completely random or idiosyncratic in their behavior.
I do agree that political science is hard in a way the physical sciences are not, though.
Thank you for the kind words! It will be a while (I'm not teaching the course until Fall 2026) but I'll try to remember to post the reading list when it's done.
It's really true. I remember observing in his first term that Trump's worst interviews were often with friendly reporters.
Thank you! These are both super helpful!
Yeah very much the same. This will be really helpful. Thank you for these recs!
That sounds perfect! Thank you! Tbh I don't know if/how DMing works on BlueSky but you can find my email here: polisci.unl.edu/person/geoff...
Very helpful! I'll reach out to him separately as well. Thanks!
This is great and something I've never encountered before. Thank you!
Please do! I have that book but have never had a good sense of what to "break off" for particular purposes! Thanks!
Never heard of this before but it looks great! Thank you so much!
Next year, I'm teaching graduate "scope & methods."
I want to mix "what is political science," "how to write a paper", "research design for causal inference", and "how to increase the credibility and public value of political science."
Any reading recs for 1st semester grad students?
Yet another fun thing going into my Research Design course next year.
Teaching grad research design when I get back from sabbatical... so this'll come in handy!
Look I know I'm old but I honestly had no idea that the Pomplamoose guy was the CEO of Patreon.
One reason why any healthy democracy needs at least two relatively healthy political parties where each sometimes wins an election, and neither destroys the democratic system when it does, is that winning elections is hard.
The idea that everyone who ever lost an election is stupid is not correct.
This is an incredibly simple and effective way to communicate an important (and pretty unfortunate) point.
This is the sound of candidates losing the struggle against the crushing weight of partisan gravity.
This is nationalization and polarization and presidentialization swallowing everything else.
This is the dangerous collapse of dimensionality, in one chart
leedrutman.substack.com/p/the-modera...
These numbers are striking.
Yeah I mean main challenge in this and other agenda-setting is measuring the "denominator." What really is available but kept off the table by all mainsteam actors?
Sure but that's a different process. The Overton Window is not a "thing" you can study. It's a rhetorical device. What's the empirical referent? ~some proposals are considered acceptable to debate and others aren't?
Actually put that way sounds kind of like Third Face of Power (or maybe the 4th?)
Well, so the Overton Window doesn't come from scholarship, it is a concept that eponymous Overton used to explain the value of think tanks to potential funders of the Mackinac Center, where he worked. One could try to conceptualize and measure it, but for now there's basically nothing to cite.
