Not Another Politics Podcast University of Chicago Podcast Network

How do we know if our democracy is healthy? For political scientist, the answer often comes down to things we can measure like responsiveness to voter’s wishes. But is that really the right thing to measure?

There are two camps in this debate. The empiricists want to focus on what and how we can measure things like the health of our democracy, often focusing on indicators like responsiveness, while the normative theorists want to focus on what we even mean…and what we should mean…by democratic health.

If you’ve listened to our show before, you can probably guess that we fall more into the empiricists camp, but we wanted to bring on someone who could challenge our assumptions.

Andrew Sabl is a political scientist from the University of Toronto and the author of “The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide” in which he argues that the empiricists need to pay more attention to what they’re measuring and why.

When it comes to our federal bureaucracy, there are two schools of thought. One says that an insulated group of career bureaucrats have created a deep state that corrupts the performance of government. The other says that our bureaucracy is dysfunctional because there is too much turnover or positions left vacant. Both rest on an underlying feature of our democracy: many of the positions in the federal bureaucracy are appointed by the President and approved by Congress. But, could having less politically selected appointments give us a more functional government?

In this episode, we’re doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with David Lewis from Vanderbilt University who wrote a primer on this question: should we have more politically appointed bureaucrats or less?

There is a long running debate in political science: do we get better judges by letting the public vote in elections or by giving our leaders the power to appoint them? One side says that judges should be insulated from the influence of politics involved in elections, focusing entirely on the rule of law. The other side says that our judges should be accountable to the public for the decisions they make in office. Who is right?

In this episode, we’re doing things a bit different. The Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, headed by our very own William Howell, has developed a series of primers that each focus on the available scholarship about the pros and cons of a particular governmental reform. Each primer is written by a scholar who has also done research in that area. On this episode, we speak with Sanford Gordon from the Politics Department at NYU who wrote a primer on this question: is it better to elect or appoint judges?

Despite making up roughly half of the U.S. population, women only make up about one-quarter of representatives and senators. And this trend is not just national—it holds true globally as well. What explains why women are underrepresented in politics? If women are just as likely to win elections as men do, then why are they less likely to run for office?

In a recent paper, "Modeling Theories of Women's Underrepresentation in Elections," University of Chicago Professors Scott Ashworth, Christopher Berry and Ethan Bueno de Mesquita explore the facts and theories around why women are elected less than men in U.S. politics. In this episode, we speak with Ashworth, a Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy.

When it comes to passing actual legislation, putting it forward and getting it all the way through the process, it can be difficult to measure exactly which legislators are effective. Not to mention which types of legislators tend to be more effective, moderates or extremists? And does majority-party membership increase effectives?

In an innovative new paper, “Effective Lawmaking Across Congressional Eras”, University of Pittsburgh professor of political science Max Goplerud proposes a new measure of legislative effectiveness that may help us to answer some of these complex questions.

When we talk about the interpretation and ultimately implementation of policy we’re not talking about Congress so much as the Administrative State. But what happens when those who work in those agencies decide through their positions to not only sabotage a policy they’re meant to carry out, but perhaps the whole agency?

In a recent paper titled “Administrative Sabotage” Rutgers law professor, David Noll, looks at the history of how agencies sabotage themselves and discuses what this means for a democracy and for the power of the Presidency.