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Articles by Eitan Hersh
American Vice in the Internet Age
This week, I’m delighted to be able to feature a guest post from Eitan Hersh and Lucia Morisse-Corsetti on the topic of marijuana, gambling, and pornography. It’s an incredibly important topic given how much more accessible and addictive these activities have become in the age of OnlyFans, Internet pornography and online sports betting. Eitan is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and the author of Politics is for Power, a favorite book of mine.
Ending transportation for private school students is wrong move
POLICYMAKERS MUST make trade-offs. Sometimes, they need to pick winners and losers. This past November, the school committee in Newton was looking for some extra dollars in its budget, and so it cut funding for transportation to private school students, nearly all of whom go to religious schools. In doing so, the public school budget will grow and religious families will see their costs go up. Budgetary choices are often zero-sum like this. One side wins, one side loses.
Evidence Vs. Hyperbole: The Relationship Between Election Laws And The Health Of Democracy
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How Election Rules Affect Who Wins
MyHoover delivers a personalized experience at Hoover.org. In a few easy steps, create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests. Watch this video for an overview of MyHoover. Create Account
U.S. College Students and the War in Israel: Jewish Engagement and Social Tension on Campus
New research conducted by Dr. Eitan Hersh provides key insights on the impact of October 7th and subsequent rise in antisemitism on Jewish college students on campus. In particular, the research examines whether and how Jewish college students are experiencing changes in Jewish identity and participation, and increased social tension, on campus.
Antisemitic Attitudes among Young Black and Hispanic Americans
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Freedom of Expression in an Age of Social Media
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The Wrong Way to Do Politics at the Office
A new style of activism in the white-collar workplace is reshaping corporate life. November 28, 2022, 6 AM ET In a 2005 episode of The Office, Michael Scott, the office manager, requires his employees to choose an upside-down index card from a tray and place it on their forehead.
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Introduction Antisemitism has become a growing concern in the United States. Antisemitic hate crimes are frequent (Feinberg 2020). Perceived concerns about the seriousness of antisemitism are high (Smith and Schapiro 2019). According to a 2020 poll, 62% of Americans and 88% of Jewish Americans consider antisemitism a problem.
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Introduction Antisemitism has become a growing concern in the United States. Antisemitic hate crimes are frequent (Feinberg 2020). Perceived concerns about the seriousness of antisemitism are high (Smith and Schapiro 2019). According to a 2020 poll, 62% of Americans and 88% of Jewish Americans consider antisemitism a problem.
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Abstract Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a “horseshoe theory” in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center. However, there is little quantitative research evaluating left-wing versus right-wing antisemitism.
Massachusetts legislators, advocates, students confront college food insecurity epidemic with House and Senate bills — STUDENT DISPATCH
The passion of advocates and students bumps up against the pace of Massachusetts’ legislative system. By Kate Seklir Laura Martinez couldn’t always afford lunch on campus so she often began her school days at Worcester State University with a cup of coffee to suppress her appetite, warding off pangs of hunger until she could eat at home. Thanks to his scholarship-funded meal plan at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Tim Scalona had a very different college experience.
Legal or not, sports betting is in demand — STUDENT DISPATCH
Massachusetts Considers Legalizing Sports Betting Consequences of commercialized sports gambling up for debate. By Alex Sharp It’s a crisp, 50-degree October night in Boston and the Red Sox are preparing to play the Houston Astros in game three of the American League Championship Series. A maximum capacity crowd of 37,673 fans who didn’t expect their team to make it this far is buying beers and Fenway franks and slowly filling the seats of America’s oldest ballpark.
Opinion | Laugh at the S.N.L. School Board Skit, Take Your Local Politics Seriously
Guest Essay Nov. 1, 2021 Credit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times By Lily Geismer and Eitan D.
Taking Rural Issues to Beacon Hill — STUDENT DISPATCH
By Alex Sharp Next to a small cemetery, surrounded by greenery stand the cardboard, recycling, and trash bins that comprise the Leverett transfer station. But on a sunny Friday afternoon in September, it’s not just a transfer station, it’s the office of Democratic State Representative Natalie Blais. “That’s where people have to go,” says Blais, by way of explaining her office’s unique location.
The Politics of 130,000 American Religious Leaders: A New Methodological Approach
Original Article Gabrielle Malina, Eitan Hersh, Corresponding Author eitan.hersh@tufts.edu Political Science, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Eitan Hersh, Associate Professor of Political Science, Tufts University, 108 Packard Hall, Medford MA, 02155, 617-627-2043.
How to Keep Your Kids Out of the Culture War Original
Even children are feeling the anxiety of the 2020 political season. Emma Green November 22, 2020 Highlights / The Atlantic For $18, fans of President Donald Trump can purchase a onesie for their three-month-old from his campaign website that declares I cry less than a Democrat. Primary, the children’s clothing company, provided instructions on its website for a DIY Ruth Bader Ginsburg Halloween costume.
The Folly of Just Throwing Money at Political Candidates Original
Donors are making campaign contributions to make themselves feel good, not to make meaningful change. 6:30 AM ET Associate professor of political science at Tufts University Shutterstock / The Atlantic Amy McGrath, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, never really stood a chance of beating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, her party’s longtime nemesis. Throughout the race, she polled a distant 10 percentage points behind the incumbent.
Health care workers need to engage on politics. It's the only way to fix mounting problems.
Eitan Hersh and Dr. Daniel Horn Health care professionals are not known for their political engagement. Our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows that among the college-educated workforce in 2016, those in health care reported lower voting rates (85%) than those in the education (91%) or legal (94%) professions. They were also less active than those in agriculture (93%), entertainment (89%), management (89%) and many other fields.
What Can Elections Do?
Image: Flickr / Rusty Clark Without pressure from social movements, they won’t produce meaningful and deeply needed reform. Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It Kevin A. Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz Verso, $29.95 (paper) Democrats have long answered public outcry over our battered social contract with a simple imperative: vote.
Physicians' political party affiliation and clinical management of obesity
Original Research Article Laura Y. Zatz Corresponding Author E-mail address: laz491@mail.harvard.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4359-5959 Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Correspondence Laura Y. Zatz, c/o Nutrition Department, 665 Huntington Avenue, Room 320, Boston, MA 02115.
The political consequences of opioid overdoses
Loading metrics Open Access Peer-reviewed Research Article Aaron R. Kaufman , Eitan D. Hersh Aaron R. Kaufman, Eitan D. Hersh Published: August 4, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236815 Figures Abstract The United States suffered a dramatic and well-documented increase in drug-related deaths from 2000 to 2018, primarily driven by prescription and non-prescription opioids, and concentrated in white and working-class areas.
The Politics Industry
Most people believe that our political system is a public institution with high-minded principles and impartial rules derived from the Constitution. In reality, it has become a private industry dominated by a textbook duopoly - the Democrats and the Republicans - and plagued and perverted by unhealthy competition between the players. Tragically, it has therefore become incapable of delivering solutions to America's key economic and social challenges.
Politics Is for Power
Politics is for Power By Eitan Hersh Read by Jonathan Todd Ross How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change Trade Paperback LIST PRICE $17.99 PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER Free shipping when you spend $40. Terms apply.
Nostalgia for the Smoke-Filled Room
Eitan Hersh, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University, mourns the passing of the smoke-filled room. Well into the 20th century—and right up through 1968 in the late Democratic Mayor Richard J. Daley’s machine-politics Chicago—there was no such thing as simply deciding to run for public office and then amassing the money and organization to put together a campaign, à la Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg.
How Democrats Can Repair Their Generational Divide
In Davidson, North Carolina—a liberal town in a conservative area of a battleground state—a group is changing the way older and younger activists work together on issues that both constituencies care about. They’re solving concrete problems that neither could do alone. They’re also learning how to reconcile different priorities (e.g. electing a Democrat to the White House, pursuing racial justice, housing affordability and so on).
Hateful Hobbyists
Review of Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersh and Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein Eitan Hersh is out with an Atlantic essay and a new book about “political hobbyists.” You know the type — in fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are the type: you follow political news closely and get really emotional about it, but you never get out there and do the damn thing.
‘We All Really Need to Do Hard Things’
In 2017, Lisa Mann was alone, riding the subway in New York City. Lisa is in her mid-fifties, an architect. She and her husband, who is also an architect, are in business together. The couple has two teenage sons, whom they raised in the Windsor Terrace and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Lisa was riding the New York subway when two teenagers got on her train car. They approached a third teenager and started to taunt him aggressively.
Opinion | Listen Up, Liberals: You Aren’t Doing Politics Right (Published 2020)
In religion and in politics, participants come together in communities to serve a higher purpose. They worship together to serve God. They join advocacy groups and political party committees to serve their civic duty. But increasingly, especially among well-educated white liberals, religion and politics are not face-to-face communal experiences. Instead, participants try to extract emotional and intellectual gratifications for themselves without obligating themselves to others.
College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics
AP Photo/Hannah Grabenstein college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists.
College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics
Political hobbyism is to public affairs what watching
College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics
Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists.
Political hobbyists are ruining politics – HotAir
What explains the rise of political hobbyism? One important historical explanation is the culture of comfort that engulfs college-educated white people, a demographic group that is now predominately Democratic. They have decent jobs and benefits. There has been no military conscription for some fifty years.
What Rich Centrists Could Learn from Howard Schultz about Political Power
Starbucks’ success proves that a multimillion-dollar advertising program isn’t a prerequisite for building a national brand—nor are the deep pockets of a big corporation. You can do it one customer at a time, one store at a time, one market at a time. In fact, that may be the best way to inspire loyalty and trust in customers.
Politics Is for Power
A brilliant condemnation of political hobbyism—treating politics like entertainment—and a call to arms for well-meaning, well-informed citizens who consume political news, but do not take political action. Who is to blame for our broken politics? The uncomfortable answer to this question starts with ordinary citizens with good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby.
Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change
Politics Is for Power (Hardcover) How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change By Eitan Hersh Scribner, 9781982116781, 288pp. Publication Date: January 14, 2020 Other Editions of This Title: Paperback (6/30/2020) Compact Disc (1/14/2020) List Price: 27.00* * Individual store prices may vary.
Politics is for Power, Not Consumption
Political hobbyism takes well-meaning citizens away from pursuing power. On a Wednesday evening this past June, a volunteer political organization was holding its monthly meeting in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Lemonade and cookies were set up in the back of a borrowed meeting room, a few blocks from the center of town, and a few young children milled around as fifty adults made their way to large round conference tables.
Politics Is for Power, Not Consumption
On a Wednesday evening this past June, a volunteer political organization was holding its monthly meeting in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Lemonade and cookies were set up in the back of a borrowed meeting room, a few blocks from the center of town, and a few young children milled around as fifty adults made their way to large round conference tables.
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous and random cost imposed on voters.
Opinion | In a Deep Blue or Red State? You Can Still Influence Politics
With the midterm election just a week away, citizens who are concerned about the fate of country are making their final push to get out the vote. Since 2016, they have joined grass-roots organizations, made phone calls to swing states and targeted donations to help campaigns pay for organizers. Volunteers are doing hard, often unrecognized, work, knocking on doors and engaging one voter at a time.
Mixed partisan households and electoral participation in the United States
Table 2 shows this imbalance more clearly as it offers conditional percentages. Among Democratic women, 67% of husbands are Democratic, but among Democratic men, 77% of wives are Democratic. Among Republican men, 73% of wives are Republican, but among Republican women, 79% of husbands are Republican. In other words, couples are more likely to share a party affiliation in households where the wife is a Republican or where the husband is a Democrat.
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections.
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group?
Hacking electorate how campaigns perceive voters | American government, politics and policy
Hacking the Electorate is the most comprehensive study to date about the consequences of campaigns using microtargeting databases to mobilize voters in elections. Eitan Hersh follows the trail from data to strategy to outcomes. Hersh argues that most of what campaigns know about voters comes from a core set of public records.
Opinion | The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is the Participants (Published 2017)
At backyard barbecues this holiday weekend, liberals will gab with one another about how much time they’re spending on politics. More than ever, they are watching cable news, and refreshing Twitter and Facebook feeds. Many kept up with the recent special House elections. Some skipped work to watch the spectacle of James Comey’s Senate hearing.
Everyone is sure their side is going to win, even when it loses big. Here’s how we know.
Combine Donald Trump’s refrain that the election is rigged with evidence that political campaigns profoundly misperceive their odds, and you get a recipe for potential unrest. Research that we conducted during the 2012 election demonstrates that voters, campaign workers, and even candidates massively overestimate their odds of winning elections.
Democratic and Republican physicians provide different care on politicized health issues
Significance Political beliefs have been shown to spill over into nonpolitical domains, such as consumer spending, choice of romantic partner, and job hiring. Our evidence suggests that political beliefs predict the professional decisions of primary care physicians. On politicized health issues, like marijuana and abortion, physicians' partisan identity is highly correlated with their treatment decisions.
Voter Suppression - FiveThirtyEight
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The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump
In recent years, Republicans have made inroads into the overwhelmingly Democratic constituency of American Jews. But this year, Republican Jews — or Jewish donors to the Republican party, at least — are abandoning their party’s nominee at a stunningly high rate.
What The Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry Can Teach Us About Political Polarization
A few weeks ago, FiveThirtyEight fielded a SurveyMonkey poll to baseball fans in the Northeast. In the survey,1 I asked 1,071 people which baseball team they supported (if any), how strongly they supported the team, and then I asked them this: How upset would you feel if you had a son or daughter who married a Boston Red Sox/New York Yankees/New York Mets/Philadelphia Phillies fan? Red Sox fans were asked about marriages to Yankees fans and vice versa.
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