Oct 12, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Finally, pundits are focusing less on policy victory or convincing voters that their political adversaries are evil, and more on the issue of whether our liberal democracy can be saved, and if so, how. Until recently, those at the forefront of the effort to preserve...
Sep 19, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
As we watch the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) use its power to stifle political dissent, we should step back and look at the story of how we got here. It is a story about the simultaneous (re)concentration of economic power, on the one hand, and the...
Sep 15, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism
I don’t normally do confessional posts on this blog, so please ignore this one if it’s not your cup of tea. But this ties back to how to preserve our deteriorating democracy. The confession is that when it comes to questionable or unethical behavior, I am...
Sep 10, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Framing and the Energy Transition Debate, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
Readers of this blog are regularly subjected to my whining about people ignoring what empirical social science research has to say about the roots of our political dysfunction. 🙂 In the Internet era, having an opinion and commanding an audience passes for deep...
Sep 4, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News
In Climate of Contempt I lament the way today’s political information environment breeds so much interpartisan fear, anger, and distrust that we “under-attend[] to the health of our democratic institutions.”[1] But one thing I did not do in my book was to...
Aug 25, 2025 | Blog, Democracy and Transitions to Authoritarianism, Journalism, Bias & Censored News, Partisanship, Elections and the Energy Transition
One of the consequences of our balkanized, fractured, and insular information environment is that fringe political movements can grow more efficiently, away from public view. People who share the same false beliefs and harbor the same political resentments can nurture...
