After several years of negative or inconsistent growth, incomes grew at a robust annualized rate of 4.6% and 4.1% in the first two quarters of this year. As I summarized in an earlier Model Politics post, voters appear unduly influenced by election-year income growth. So, these numbers are great news ...
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The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University is currently conducting the Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project. This project allows the public to weigh in on political ads from this election cycle instead of pundits or the media. The survey sample is made up of 600 Democrats, Republicans, ...
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Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate puts fiscal policy—government spending, taxes, and debt—squarely in the center of this year’s presidential campaign. The latest YouGov survey suggests that expectations about future budget deficits under President Obama or President Romney were having a major impact on prospective voters’ ...
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With Mitt Romney having picked Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, we can shed some light on these questions: What do people know about Ryan? And what do they think of him? A series of polls done by YouGov for the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project suggests that most people have never heard ...
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Political scientists have long debated whether presidents can persuade people. George Edwards has amassed a vast array of evidence against presidential persuasion. Others, like Amnon Cavari in a recent paper, argue presidents can lead public opinion. The latter view was boosted by polls that showed some movement towards gay marriage after Obama’s switch to support. However, Ryan Enos ...
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Back in January, Lynn Vavreck, Joshua Tucker, and I asked this question: what would happen if people knew more specific details about Mitt Romney's income and tax rate? We conducted a simple experiment that exposed people to information about these topics. In this post, I will report on a new ...
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In the two weeks since the Supreme Court upheld Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), journalists and pundits have scrutinized the public’s response. Most have found quite mixed reviews of the decision. For example, Pew reports divided approval of the court’s decision, with “disappointed” being the most common one-word reaction to ...
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For the last four years, Barack Obama has been plagued by rumors that he is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and, as a result, is not eligible to serve as president. These rumors continue to show surprising resilience As I showed in a Model Politics post from ...
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The current debate over tax policy is laden with competing claims about the supposed economic benefits of cutting taxes for different income groups. Republican politicians justify their support for cutting taxes on the wealthy by arguing that such tax cuts would stimulate economic growth. But when faced with proposals intended ...
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Political Science has been in the news a fair bit of late, although not necessarily for the best of reasons. In referring to research supporting the notion of global warming, for example, former Senator Rick Santorum pejoratively labeled it as “Political Science.” In the House, the Flake amendment, which would ...
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