Join the Cyber Policy Center on May 28th from Noon–1PM Pacific with speaker David Broockman, Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, for Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability in the American Electorate. The session will be moderated by Nate Persily co director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and is part of the Spring Seminar Series, a series spanning April through June hosted at the Cyber Policy Center. Sessions are in-person and virtual, via Zoom and streamed via YouTube, with in-person attendance offered to Stanford affiliates only. Lunch is provided for in-person attendance and registration is required. Sessions will take place in Encina Commons, Moghadam Room 123, 615 Crothers Way on Stanford Campus.

Scholars have debated to what extent Americans’ views on issues are stable, moderate, and ideological. These questions are crucial for understanding polarization and representation, such as to what extent swing voters hold centrist views on issues or are instead cross-pressured across issues; and to what extent the public supports extreme policies. We illustrate why these questions are linked and the need to address them simultaneously. To address these questions, we present a statistical model which estimates the share of individuals’ expressed views which can be explained by ideology, idiosyncrasy, and instability. In pilot data, we find that these explain roughly similar shares of the variation in Americans’ views, but that these shares vary meaningfully across people. We find that ideology is tightly linked to political knowledge, while idiosyncrasy – not instability – is most linked with expressing extreme views. Finally, we find that few voters who prior work characterizes as moderate have centrist views across most issues, but that they are rather largely cross-pressured, agreeing with each party---and sometimes being more extreme than either party---on different issues.

About the Speaker

David Broockman is an Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Broockman earned his BA from Yale University in 2011 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He previously served as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Broockman is the author of over three dozen peer-reviewed scholarly essays focusing on American politics. Broockman's research has overturned conventional wisdom regarding the nature, extent, and consequences of political polarization in the American public; how political campaigns and organizations can more effectively persuade voters; and how to have productive conversations to bridge divides and reduce prejudice. He has received a number of scholarly awards, including a Carnegie Fellowship, the American Political Science Association Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Section’s Emerging Scholar Award, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest, the Joseph L. Bernd Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Politics, and the Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Science. He recently delivered a Centennial Lecture for the Social Science Research Council on political polarization. His research has changed how political campaigns, think tanks, activist organizations, and politicians understand and attempt to persuade the electorate, and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, and Vox, and on NPR’s This American Life.