The Democratic and Republican Parties both make strong claims that their policies benefit racial and ethnic minorities. These claims have, however, received little systematic empirical assessment. This is an important omission, because democracy rests on the ability of the electorate to evaluate the responsiveness of those who govern. We assess Democrats’ and Republicans’ claims by compiling ce...

In this work, we study the use of Twitter by House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates during the midterm (2010) elections in the U.S. Our data includes almost 700 candidates and over 690k documents that they produced and cited in the 3.5 years leading to the elections. We utilize graph and text mining techniques to analyze differences between Democrats, Republicans and Tea Party candidates, a...

Labor unions play a central role in the Democratic party coalition, providing candidates with voters, volunteers, and contributions. Has the recent decline of organized labor hurt Democrats? We use the enactment of right-to-work laws—which weaken unions by removing closed shop protections—to estimate the effect of unions on politics from 1980 to 2016. Comparing counties on either side of a stat...

We examine political polarization over climate change within the American public by analyzing data from 10 nationally representative Gallup Polls between 2001 and 2010. We find that liberals and Democrats are more likely to report beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus and express personal concern about global warming than are conservatives and Republicans. Further, the effects of edu...

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After meeting with health officials on 1 July, US President Barack Obama has called on Congress to back a bill to fund the US response to the Zika virus disease outbreak before it breaks for its seven week summer recess. “We have to get the money from Congress over the next two weeks to make sure that we can begin to develop the effective vaccines, the mosquito abatement tools, the state emerge...

Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex...

While expert groups often make recommendations on a range of non-controversial as well as controversial issues, little is known about how the level of expert consensus-the level of expert agreement-influences perceptions of the recommendations. This research illustrates that for non-controversial issues expert groups that exhibit high levels of agreement are more persuasive than expert groups t...

Delay discounting has been used as a measure of both self control and of value for a particular commodity. Two hundred sixty five college psychology students who self identified as being either a Democrat or a Republican completed a delaydiscounting task involving five different commodities (two monetary values, retirement income, Federal legislation, and medical treatment). Analyzing the area ...