Information Marketplace: Ensuring The Public Has The Data

Republican leaders and political analysts have widely embraced and promoted that Donald Trump uniquely attracted working-class voters to the GOP. New research including survey data on voting behavior going back to the 1980s contradicts this assumption. In fact, Trump’s term in office stalled a long-term trend of White working-class voters moving to the Republican Party. Read More

Digital technology allows for the frictionless spread of information, including false and manipulated content. As a nation that has enshrined freedom of speech in the First Amendment of our Constitution, the policy levers available to U.S. officials to confront the free flow of dangerous misinformation—whether pertaining to COVID-19, elections or other matters of existential significance to lives and our democratic institutions—are necessarily circumscribed. Thankfully, misinformation scholars have proposed policies that comply with Constitutional limitations and have the potential to mitigate the hazards of misinformation.  Read More

Despite conventional wisdom, behavioral evidence repeatedly suggests that most Americans are not avid consumers of political news. Instead, they are spending an astounding amount of time engaging with entertainment media. It is time to face the extent to which politics and non-political media consumption are closely intertwined. The role of ‘The Apprentice’ in the rise of President Trump is one such example. Going forward, politicians need to rewrite the standard political playbook to reach an inattentive public. Read More

Committee chairs in the 116th Congress in the House and Senate continue a trend of decreasing lawmaking effectiveness as consistently reported in the Center for Effective Lawmaking comprehensive dataset (1973-2020). Perhaps restoring some of their prominence would offer opportunities for Congress to address America’s greatest public policy challenges. As seen in The Hill with the title "Committee chairs continue their lawmaking decline" (March 26, 2021). Read More

Minimizing the personal and economic costs of a global pandemic requires the coordination of federal, state and local governments. When it comes to implementing stay-at-home orders with the simultaneous and competing goals of minimizing community spread and business dislocation, our data-driven analysis demonstrates the value of public policy discretion at the state and local level. Read More