In Dartmouth's Vox Daily quote of the day for Monday October 9th, QSS Steering Committe member Brendan Nyhan asks "Can any democratic principle be called into question, or is there a bright line the public won't cross?" This quote is pulled from an October 5th article in Vox, "4 political scientists are tracking whether Trump is damaging American democracy"
QSS Steering Committee member Yusaku Horiuchi was interviewed by The D on his teaching, research, background and interests. Read the full article here.
In a recent article in The Upshot entitled Nearly Half of Americans Don't Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens, Dartmouth lecturer Kyle Dropp and QSS faculty member Brendan Nyhan show that many Americans are not aware of the fact that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. This knowledge effects whether or not individuals believe Puerto Rico should receive additional government aid in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
DJ Flynn, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, and Yusaku Horiuchi, an affiliated faculty member in the program who teaches a popular data visualization course, have published a new article in Science Advances. This article, which is co-authored with Jeremy Fewerda of the Department of Government, is an analysis of attitudes in the United States toward refugee resettlement. Ferwerda, Flynn, and Horiuchi show that Americans are less supportive of refugee resettlement locally than they are elsewhere in the United States. This highlights how refugee resettlement is a collective action problem facing the country. Ferwerda, Flynn, and Horiuchi also show that threatening media frames reduce support for refugee resettlement. In addition to the article in Science Advances, this research has also been covered in CITYLAB, (Even Liberals Can be Refugee NIMBYs) and in The Dartmouth News (Study Shows Support for Refugees Drops Off Closer to Home).
Erik Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, has published an article in Journal of Politics on the role of information in partisan voting. Erik received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 2017 and started his fellowship at Dartmouth in August. Using a survey experiment and an observational study of voting in Congressional elections, Erik's article shows that more informative media environments reduce voters' reliance on partisanship to evaluate politicians. Erik's dissertation at Stanford was titled "Causes and Consequences of News Media Content." At Dartmouth, Erik will work on a project examining the political consequences of the widespread layoffs of newspaper journalists that have occurred over the past decade.