Episodes

  • What Predicts Midterm Election Results?

    What Predicts Midterm Election Results?
    Mar 4 2026
    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 ideological direction of public opinion consistently predict congressional vote choices. Like this year, both usually move against the president in midterms. Neither economic statistics and perceptions nor the degree of partisan competition matters independently of those patterns. Generic ballot polls reliably predict seat gains, though a lot more for the House than the Senate.
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    56 mins
  • Legislators are raising money instead of making policy

    Legislators are raising money instead of making policy
    Feb 18 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Can AI ‘vibe research’ replace social science?

    Can AI ‘vibe research’ replace social science?
    Feb 4 2026
    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 an extension of his research paper with AI in an hour. He's now compared his results to an extension by hand and created a tool to allow readers to make their own design choices. We discuss the early evidence on how AI has changed research output and quality. The future of research is coming fast.
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • How authoritarian parenting attitudes explain our political divides

    How authoritarian parenting attitudes explain our political divides
    Jan 21 2026
    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.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Which groups win policy under each party?

    Which groups win policy under each party?
    Jan 8 2026
    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.
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    54 mins
  • How media incentives stoked the culture war

    How media incentives stoked the culture war
    Dec 10 2025
    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.
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    59 mins