The new season of Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences podcast examines the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the upcoming presidential election.
This season of the Omnia podcast from Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences examines the state of U.S. democracy in the context of the upcoming presidential election. Episodes 1 through 3 address the topics of the myths and realities of political polarization, how media is shaping the understanding of the issues and candidates, and how state voting laws have changed.
Episode 1, “Truth and Democracy,” features Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, in conversation with Stephanie Perry, executive director of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies (PORES) and the Fox Leadership Program, about some of the big questions at the heart of American democracy like whether common sense has changed in the context of politics, how a healthy democracy works, and who decides what’s true in democracy.
Episode 2, “The Voice of Democracy, features Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication, discussing media-related topics, from media consumption to the institution’s influence on how the public understands government and politics.
And Episode 3 features Matthew Levendusky, professor of political science and Stephen and Mary Baran Chair in the Institutions of Democracy at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, discussing the myths and realities of political polarization in the United States in “The Fight for Democracy.”
Episode 1 highlights:
4:31 [Sophia Rosenfeld] If you’ve been following the news this week, you’ll see that both Vice President Harris and former President Trump have called themselves common sense candidates and mentioned some of their policies as common sense. Common sense on gun control or common sense on the immigration question. So I’m interested in where did we get this idea and what has it done? And my hypothesis at least is that common sense was very useful to the emergence of democracy. It’s all over the age of revolutions. Why? Because it suggested that people shared something, some kind of basic wisdom, not deep knowledge of things, but a kind of collection of truisms almost that they shared.
Episode 2 highlights:
4:45 [Diana Mutz] I think it’s really just the availability of choice, human beings are drawn to those like themselves. That’s nothing new. That’s always been true. We’ve just made it a lot easier for people to do that by having so many different channels, if we’re talking about television exposure, and by offering ones that are partisan. But social media, which is often blamed a great deal for polarization in the U.S., we actually don’t find that it’s nearly as bad as television in terms of reinforcing people’s political views and increasing polarization. People are exposed to cross-cutting views at times via social media. It’s not that people are out there wanting to discuss across lines of difference, they actually shy away from that. But when you’re on social media, huge amount is just what you’re watching other people do, and they’re a small percentage of people on social media who do most of the talking and the rest of us just watch, but we do get a sense of what the other side is thinking from that as well.
Episode 3 highlights:
15:40 [Matthew Levendusky] So for the media, the incentive is to frame stories in front in terms of conflict, because conflict is gripping, it’s newsworthy. And if you think about, in many ways, politics is a question of conflict. If I’m going to cover Congress, a lot of the coverage will be over, what can Schumer and McConnell agree to bring to the floor? What can Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson do to prevent the government from shutting down? So that’s a natural frame for political media, but the problem is then when that becomes the only frame for politics, it then reifies and reaffirms those divisions, and again, reinforces this message that there isn’t common ground, that people are deeply divided. And so it begins to become a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle. For political elites, there’s also the same strategy that there were some early studies done, maybe these authors now regret doing them, 25 years ago, showing that these sort of appeals to threat and saying the other side is a danger and you’re going to lose your rights if they’re elected, was a very mobilizing message, because that is. That sounds terrible, right? But it also then becomes self-perpetuating because then that becomes the message of everything. It kind of leads to this view that, oh, if the other side wins, it’s going to all be a disaster. And I understand that for a lot of people, they might feel that the other party will advance policies that they don’t like, but it is also important to remember that there are important checks and balances within the system and things that we can all do to help keep it from veering too far off.
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