POLITICS

Where did all the swing voters go?

The role of swing voters in presidential elections has declined sharply in the past two decades as party polarization has steadily increased, says Kennedy School Professor Thomas Patterson. He finds that the swing vote was common in the 1970s—when Jimmy Carter’s 33-point lead dwindled to a cliffhanger outcome on election day—and remained an important factor into the 1992 presidential race. But since then, as partisan hostility for the other party has grown, fewer voters have proved willing to change their allegiance, Patterson writes in the latest installment of his “Election Beat 2020” series for the Journalist’s Resource, a project of the School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. In the 2020 race, Patterson says fewer than 10 percent of self-described likely voters are undecided with two months to go, compared with three times that many swing voters in presidential races a few decades ago.

Also: “Campaigns influence election outcomes less than you think,” co-authored by HKS Professor Todd Rogers, Science

POLITICS

“Election Influence Operations Playbook” helps officials confront election disinformation

A new handbook from the Kennedy School’s Defending Digital Democracy Project is designed to help election administrators and campaign officials recognize and counter mis- and disinformation incidents around elections. The Election Influence Operations Playbook focuses on “influence operations” that target elections operations and infrastructure by deliberately spreading disinformation on social media platforms and other public spaces. The project, based at the School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is led by HKS Lecturer Eric Rosenbach, the center’s co-director, along with DDD Executive Director Maria Barsallo Lynch. The project has released a series of election playbooks to help officials safeguard the integrity of elections.

SOCIAL POLICY

Is ‘cancel culture’ stifling academic freedom and political science debate?

In a new working paper, HKS Lecturer Pippa Norris finds that conservative political scientists who responded to a recent survey reported having experienced “cancel culture" in academic life more than colleagues on the ideological left: They reported a decline in respect for open debate from diverse perspectives, facing pressure to be politically correct, and feeling that academic freedom to teach and conduct research had worsened over the last five years. Using data from a global survey of political scientists from 102 countries, Norris created a Cancel Culture Index to measure the relationship between ideology and academic life. The survey documented that political scientists in the United States skew toward the left, with 65 percent identifying as moderate left compared with just 20 percent on the moderate right, and more of those who placed themselves on the right reported worsening cancel culture pressures. Norris also examined global survey data from other countries. As in the United States, she found that in post-industrial countries “more rightwing political scientists reported that, in their own experience, the cancel culture had worsened in recent years.” By contrast, among scholars from developing countries, more self-identified left-wing scholars reported a worsening cancel culture.

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• The emotionally challenging next phase of the pandemic [Juliette Kayyem] The Atlantic

• The charter school advantage [Paul Peterson, M. Danish Shakeel]  Wall Street Journal