Larry Bartels

Media Appearances

• The Populist Phantom

  Many countries have been roiled in recent years by what is often called a “populist wave.” In the Anglophone world, this new era began in 2016 with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Media and political elites shocked by these events tied themselves in knots trying to figure out what had happened and why. According to the most popular strand of this thinking, the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory were the reverberations of a profound economic and social transformation. Globalization and technological change had shattered the livelihoods .

  November 1st, 2024

• What I’m Reading: Why Democracy Erodes From the Top

  First up is an interesting academic work on democratic backsliding — that is, the process of countries turning less democratic over time, eventually becoming semi-autocratic “hybrid” regimes, or even outright autocracies. In “Democracy Erodes From the Top: Leaders, Citizens and the Challenges of Populism in Europe,” published last year, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, uses public opinion data to challenge the popular understanding of the links between right-wing populism and democratic backsliding in Europe.

  August 16th, 2024

• Biden’s chances of re-election are better than they appear

  The third lesson, however, is a lot better for Mr Biden: voters have short memories. “The clear consensus in the literature is that recent economic performance is much more relevant at election time than earlier performance,” write Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, two political scientists, in their book “Democracy for Realists”. Americans, they argue, “vote on the basis of how they feel at the moment” and “forget or ignore how they have felt over the course of the incumbent’s term in office”. The authors show that increases in real disposable income per person in only the two quarters before a vote can, with an adjustment for tenure in the White House, predict the vote share of parties that are governing America to a striking degree of accuracy.

  February 1st, 2024

• Spain's Vox party stumbles, testing limits of European far-right advance

  But across Europe, the average vote share of right-wing populist parties has increased only modestly, from about 12% to 13% at the turn of the century to about 15% now, said Larry Bartels, professor at Vanderbilt University.

  July 24th, 2023

• A 2023 Recession Wouldn’t Be So Bad for Biden. A Downturn in 2024 Would

  “The historical record suggests that a recession in the second half of 2023 would probably be less damaging to the president’s reelection prospects than a recession in the first half of 2024,” said Larry Bartels, who studies the intersection of politics and economics at Vanderbilt University. But he also said there’s not much that Biden can do at this point to change the direction of the economy in the short term.

  June 18th, 2023

• Three Ways The New Primary Calendar Could Change The Nominating Process

  “Iowa is indeed Republican-trending,” Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels told HuffPost, “but its Democratic Party activists have been pretty liberal.”

  December 2nd, 2022

• GOP, long the law and order party, slams FBI, Justice Department over search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago

  That polarization has led to a redefining of law and order, according to Larry Bartels, political science professor at Vanderbilt University. The issue of law and order has had a long, successful run in American politics, in part because it is conveniently flexible in its application, he said. It started with former President Richard Nixon, who famously remarked that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he said. With polarized politics, “people firmly committed to one side increasingly convince themselves that any opposition must be illegitimate, even if it comes from individuals or institutions previously viewed as legitimate,” Bartels said.

  August 10th, 2022

• With ‘Stealth Politics,’ Billionaires Make Sure Their Money Talks

  Teaming up with a colleague at Vanderbilt University, Larry Bartels, Page and Seawright started by surveying wealthy people in the Chicago area — interviewing a random sample of 83 individuals from households with a median worth of $7.5 million. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that these multimillionaires skewed very conservative on economic issues, expressing a preference for marketplaces and philanthropy, rather than governments, to solve public problems; some also supported reductions to Social Security and Medicare. (At the same time, earlier research showed, affluent Americans tended to take socially liberal stances, supporting abortion and gay rights.) The resulting study, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” felt small to Page, its data insufficient and limited by geography. But he thought he could use it as proof of concept to generate interest for a first-of-its-kind national data set.

  April 6th, 2022

• The Memo: The pre-Trump ‘normal’ is gone for good

  “I think of Donald Trump primarily as a symptom rather than a cause of democratic dysfunction,” said Professor Larry Bartels, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. “The fact that so many ordinary people have been willing to follow him so far is a telling indication of how politically polarized our society has become. The fact that so many political elites have been willing to follow him so far is even more telling, and even more unhealthy,” Bartels added.

  June 2nd, 2021

• The Republican revolt against democracy, explained in 13 charts

  This chart, from a September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters, analyzing the link between respondents’ score on a measure of “ethnic antagonism” and their support for four anti-democratic statements (e.g., “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”). The graphic shows a clear finding: The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale, the more likely they are to support anti-democratic ideas. This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump. “The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism,” he writes.

  March 1st, 2021