Oplæg af David Broockman fra UC Berkeley

David Broockman will give a talk on “Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability in the American Electorate” on 27 June, at 13:00 in the large meeting room (see abstract and bio below).

Bio: David Broockman is an Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Broockman earned his BA from Yale University in 2011 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He previously served as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Broockman is the author of over three dozen peer-reviewed scholarly essays focusing on American politics. Broockman’s research has overturned conventional wisdom regarding the nature, extent, and consequences of political polarization in the American public; how political campaigns and organizations can more effectively persuade voters; and how to have productive conversations to bridge divides and reduce prejudice. He has received a number of scholarly awards, including a Carnegie Fellowship, the American Political Science Association Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Section’s Emerging Scholar Award, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest, the Joseph L. Bernd Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Politics, and the Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Science.

"Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability in the American Electorate" (David Broockman and Benjamin Lauderdale)

Abstract: Scholars have debated to what extent Americans’ views on issues are stable, moderate, and ideological. These questions are crucial for understanding polarization and representation, such as to what extent swing voters hold centrist views on issues or are instead cross-pressured across issues; and to what extent the public supports extreme policies. We illustrate why these questions are linked and the need to address them simultaneously. To address these questions, we present a statistical model which estimates the share of individuals’ expressed views which can be explained by ideology, idiosyncrasy, and instability. In pilot data, we find that these explain roughly similar shares of the variation in Americans’ views, but that these shares vary meaningfully across people. We find that ideology is tightly linked to political knowledge, while idiosyncrasy – not instability – is most linked with expressing extreme views. Finally, we find that few voters who prior work characterizes as moderate have centrist views across most issues, but that they are rather largely cross-pressured, agreeing with each party---and sometimes being more extreme than either party---on different issues.

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