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Matt Grossmann Profile picture
Matt Grossmann
Michigan State political scientist & @ippsr Director; @hookedlansing Co-owner; Also: @niskanencenter @fivethirtyeight; New book: How Social Science Got Better
@Junior_prompt_engineer@mastodon.online (Mastodon) Profile picture Puneet Kollipara Profile picture 2 added to My Authors
Nov 17, 2022 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
State government policy becomes consistent with state public opinion as conservative & liberal states elect Republican & Democratic officials & as officials adjust policy to public opinion

Highly recommend Dynamic Democracy by @cwarshaw & @DevinCaughey
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… State public opinion has grown more liberal over the long-term on racial issues, more liberal over the short term on cultural issues, & moved up & down on economic issues after a move right

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… Image
Oct 12, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Highly recommend “The Bitter End” by @johnmsides @vavreck @CTausanovitch
on the 2020 election, a campaign where not much changed opinions despite lots of big news

hookedlansing.com/book/978069121…

Here is the relatively stable horse race & consistent Biden favorability advantage
1/n The primary race was, by the end, less stable. But Biden & Sanders drew most coverage & public support for most of the campaign. & Biden won with a similar coalition as Clinton: older & more partisan voters & Black voters

The Bitter End
hookedlansing.com/book/978069121…
2/n
Sep 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Americans increasingly perceive important differences between the parties

Fun new @electionstudies charts:
isr-anesweb.isr.umich.edu/ANES_Data_Tool… Americans increasingly perceive the Republican Party as the more conservative party but some Americans remain ideologically confused
isr-anesweb.isr.umich.edu/ANES_Data_Tool…
Sep 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 5 min read
When Information About Candidates Persuades Voters

New @NiskanenCenter #ScienceOfPolitics podcast/transcript with @j_kalla & @cantstopkevin

Voters still change their partisan vote choice in response to information & do take signals of candidate quality

niskanencenter.org/when-informati… @NiskanenCenter @j_kalla @cantstopkevin Testing 100s of messages on 1000s of voters in the 2020 presidential election, voters can be persuaded, especially with specific information about Biden:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
Even Republicans change their vote choice, suggesting that campaign information can shift votes:
Jul 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Nationalization made state policy respond more to party control, with legislators responding to activist donors over public opinion, parties copying electorally successful policies only in same-party states, & Rep states causing democratic backsliding

press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove… Not all policies moved rightward in Red states & leftward in Blue states; some policies like criminal justice were unresponsive to party control. But overall red & blue states diverged, making them more consistent with opinion in their states, but not responsive to opinion change
Jul 6, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
@whstancil High turnout is unrelated to partisan election outcomes: @whstancil The current congressional majority has historically high rates of both party unity & win rates in both chambers:
Jul 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you think Democrats benefit from extreme Republican candidates (or vice versa), you should apply the same logic & evidence to the other side. If you think more extreme candidates hurt the other side but help your side, you’re just engaged in wishful thinking. The penalty for ideological extremism is real but small & shrinking. It doesn’t apply to only one party. If you expect large candidate effects in 2022, I would downgrade them. But you should expect some & they should run in the traditional direction toward experience & moderation
Jan 29, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Across Western democracies, the education divide slowly reversed where the educated now vote for parties of the left, even as the income divide (with rich voting for parties of the right) usually remained

From Political Cleavages & Social Inequalities:
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is… There is no cross-national increase in the age divide. But later generations have both been more educated & more likely to divide in their voting based on education (with educated younger voting left & non-educated younger voting right)
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
Jan 29, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Democratic partisanship increases with Republican extremism but decreases as Democrats move leftward, especially among Southern Whites. Simulations for 2020 suggest these strong negative effects of an aggressive leftward move

From Dynamic Partisanship:
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… Their measure of left-right movement is perceptions of the party partitions on all ANES scales, which include racial & non-racial issue positions as well as ideology. At individual & aggregate levels, moving away from the perceived center loses adherents
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…
Jan 29, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Racial resentment, from this alternative scale, stems from just-world orientation & legitimizing racial myths, not prejudice, producing retribution in support of maintaining the status quo

From: Racial Resentment in the Political Mind
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… The traditional racial resentment scale has become more closely tied to views of liberals & conservatives over time & is not closely tied to views of whites

From: Racial Resentment in the Political Mind

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…
Jan 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Most poli sci may agree with this. But when it comes to explaining federal policy change, policy historians tend to find plenty of important idiosyncratic individual-level factors. And structural factors don't explain as much policy change as we expect:
mattgrossmann.tumblr.com/artistsofthepo… But individual agency does not imply lack of structure. e.g. Manchin is the pivotal vote due to structural factors.

Most proposed policy changes fail. Structure often explains what is possible, but laws still require lots of individual actions & compromises to be enacted.
Jan 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Commenting on national politics is not efficacious compared to acting in local politics, even if you are most concerned with national outcomes & electoral rules
nytimes.com/2022/01/09/opi… But I don’t think Democratic uninvolvement in local politics is a huge issue; where they are most involved, it is often in NIMBYism & professional interests. There are people running in most winnable places & no great Republican advantage. Fundraising & volunteering are high
Dec 19, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Getting House & all but 1 same-party Senator on board with ~full plausible presidential agenda in 1st year is historically unusual progress. They won over the other key holdout. How did they do it? By rewriting half the bill to meet their (~ridiculous) terms. They can do it again Pelosi had unmeetable conflicting ~plausible demands & ~managed face saving. But Schumer? He spent a month arguing with the parliamentarian & claiming a quick vote. He didn’t prepare caucus & make the cuts. They miscalculated. They need Manchin & called the wrong bluff
Dec 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Don’t view this as final. They have to substantially cut the bill to meet Manchin’s terms (1.75 in ~permanent programs). Everyone else’s “red lines” are not real because they prefer a reduced bill to nothing; Manchin has the leverage, some others are slow to realize Manchin has been ~consistent since the July letter, actually come up 250B but clear he didn’t except sunsets to get to his ceiling. Many didn’t want to hear it or fell for others’ bluffs. “make him vote against it” doesn’t work with someone running to cameras to say he’s a no
Dec 2, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I loved “Dawn of Everything”

Here’s the best review I’ve found:
washingtonpost.com/outlook/after-…

You do have to see it as a political project combined with an early human history & popularization of anthropology, but it shows how we can learn by questioning biases of received history In How Social Science Got Better, I found that popularized debates make progress by bringing scholars with very different knowledge bases & assumptions into conversation. There is lots of overclaiming but it can clarify disputes. We also learn by thinking from different biases
Nov 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
We are building a new congressional data archive with member, district, & policymaking variables by district-year & state-year, modeled on @IPPSR’s Correlates of State Policy:
ippsr.msu.edu/public-policy/…

& @joshmccrain’s congressional data integrations:
congressdata.joshuamccrain.com/congressional_… We are currently cataloging available data, making crosswalks, converting/aggregating bill & policymaking data to district-year, updating, & compiling all district Census data. If you have relevant datasets, suggestions, or problem notes, please reach out. We would love your help
Nov 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Good video on how many all-Dem states & cities have restrictive housing, regressive taxes, & segregated education.

But state policy changes very slowly, only partly due to partisanship, & most policies have limited effects:
mattgrossmann.tumblr.com/redstateblues Overall, Democratic & Republican states don't perform differently across objective indicators, even though you can find polarized policies with real effects:
niskanencenter.org/do-democrats-a…

We consistently overestimate the party control -> policy change -> socio-economic outcomes path
Nov 5, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This confusion seems to be widespread. Thermostatic politics does not require Biden to change his policy proposals from the campaign. It also does not require close voter attention to policy detail. It just requires voters to see or expect a leftward change in policy from Trump eg voters asked in the Trump era whether they want more or less immigration or more or less health care spending are now being asked more or less from a new (or expected new) status quo. Fewer should now say more & more should say less, even if no one has changed ideal views
Oct 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
New @ippsr report on Michigan redistricting draft maps for hearings this week:
ippsr.msu.edu/sites/default/…

We analyzed the collaborative maps across their criteria

Some initial findings:
ippsr.msu.edu/sites/default/…

More resources:
ippsr.msu.edu/redistricting The Commission pursued a voting rights strategy that maximizes districts with Black population around 40%. Compared to the computer-generated random maps, this looks quite different. Here are draft maps for state House with the highest Black populations:

ippsr.msu.edu/sites/default/…
Oct 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Across Western democracies, the education divide slowly reversed from higher education voters favoring parties on the ideological right in the 1960s to favoring parties on the ideological left by 2020, easing but not reversing the income divide
academic.oup.com/qje/advance-ar… In multi-party systems, the education divide coincided with the rise of Green parties on high-education left & anti-immigration parties on low-education right. In the US, factions arose within the major parties, making the 2-party education divide stronger & income divide weaker
Oct 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The average swing against the president's party in the midterm election is -3.8% in share of the national House popular vote & -6.2% in House seat share. If that happened from 2020 to 2022, Dems would end up with only 47.7% of the 2-party popular vote & a 45 seat deficit Image So far, Biden’s underwater approval has not translated into any sign of an anti-Democratic wave on the generic ballot. But research finds ballot numbers follow prez approval & a thermostatic ideological reaction against direction of policy. An R wave would be historically normal ImageImage