Archives: Show Notes

More about Seth & his work: https://www.sethmasket.com
Seth’s book Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020
https://www.sethmasket.com/learning-from-loss/

Preview of Seth’s new book (coming summer 2026): The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders
https://www.sethmasket.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/

Subscribe to his (excellent) Substack, Tusk
https://smotus.substack.com

Follow him on Instagram and Bluesky (he’s @smotus most places)
https://www.instagram.com/smotus/
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wgfz5e3rv4mxgtcpypddfruu

Full Episode https://www.patreon.com/posts/can-we-vote-our-151097423
https://patreon.com/politicalreality

Further Reading & Resources on Voting Theory

1. Kenneth Arrow’s amazing 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179316/social-choice-and-individual-values/

a. A good writeup of the basics of the math if you don’t want to buy a book:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/

2. Arrow’s 1950 paper introducing the idea (this paper is magnificent and you simply must read it):
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/256963

a. Non-paywalled version:
https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/meetings/mathofranking/ref/arrow.pdf

3. A nice primer on Condorcet’s Paradox:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/14-75-political-economy-and-economic-development-fall-2012/a9fd8e5ab75a325016094e6bbe625b2a_MIT14_75F12_Lec12.pdf

a. Even more on the math of voting systems:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/

️ 4. Early work on approval voting by Steve Brams, a leading thinker on it:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/approval-voting/7CE5DEEE235794B0B12F76ADAE621482

a. Video of Brams talking about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZiS3U7EG0M

b. Uh oh! It’s a video from forever ago of Andrea interviewing Brams about approval voting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAlxoW8WLX4

️ 5. Some prominent advocacy groups on voting system reform:

a. Approval voting:
https://electionscience.org/

b. Ranked-choice voting:
https://fairvote.org/

6. Political science professor Lindsey Cormack speaking (admittedly briefly in these clips) about some tradeoffs around Ranked-Choice Voting (sneak preview, she’ll be a guest on the show in the not-so-distant future; her instagram @howtoraiseacitizen is also a great resource on civics, politics, and current events (e.g., the SAVE act; more on that soon, too)):

a. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLGXzYVMOyX/?hl=en

b. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPkrogss5K/?hl=en

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Follow Tom:
Tom Pepinsky’s website with links to his research & books: https://tompepinsky.com
Tom’s blog: https://tompepinsky.com/blog
His substack: https://tompepinsky.substack.com/

Selected books and peer-reviewed works by Tom relevant to this episode:
Recent paper on authoritarianism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2020.1775589
Recent paper on voting in authoritarian vs. democratic systems: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/voting-in-authoritarian-elections/1C066CD75F6F070930181135B288F632
Book on global challenges to democracy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-challenges-to-democracy/C50D0AC769FF0AA2C62DA9337F2C03E6
Covid paper we briefly referenced: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249596
Book based on his research on partisanship and Covid: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691218991/pandemic-politics

Selected essays by Tom relevant to this episode:
Preventing a slide into authoritarianism in the US: https://www.vox.com/politics/477317/donald-trumps-ego-democracy-authoritarianism
Crucial characteristics of fascism: https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/03/berman-on-fascism/
An absolutely fantastic “mini syllabus” on how to make sense of the Trump administration through a comparative political science lens: https://tompepinsky.com/2016/12/21/comparative-politics-and-the-trump-administration/
US’s lost leadership in East Asia: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/02/a-united-states-that-is-disintegrating-and-no-longer-a-leader-in-asia/
Life in authoritarian states: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump

Working papers by Tom relevant to this episode:
Democratic backsliding: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5363315
Biased learning from elections: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/q9zpm_v2

Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

Full Video episode available on Patreon
⁠https://www.patreon.com/posts/149974348⁠

Full Audio episode available on Patreon
⁠https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-polarization-149962215⁠

The graph on total immigration numbers vs. percentage of the US population is from the Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

Evidence that the percentage of immigrants in the US peaked recently, but is in the ballpark of an earlier wave is from Pew Research.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findings-about-us-immigrants/sr_25-08-21_immigrants-in-the-us_1/
(n.b. I may have said in the episode that this was in 2023 or 24, when actually it was January 2025, more recent than I realized. I don’t know if that matters!)

In the episode I mentioned the Deportation Data Project.
https://deportationdata.org

You can explore their ICE data here.
https://deportationdata.org/data/processed/ice

And read more about the FOIA requests/challenges around getting this data here.
https://deportationdata.org/docs/ice.html#faq

I also specifically mentioned my favorite public opinion dataset (which I will likely reference a lot in this show!), which is the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset.
https://electionstudies.org

I also recently wrote about some of these trends in an article for The Preamble, a digital magazine about US politics from Sharon McMahon.
https://thepreamble.com/p/eight-charts-that-explain-the-immigration
https://thepreamble.com
https://sharonmcmahon.com

You’ll see some of the charts we talked about in the episode as well as links to other sources, particularly various additional Pew Research data, in the article.

More data will be available on https://politicalrealitypodcast.com

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How do we quantify misinformation?

Thank you to Prof. Joshua A. Tucker for joining us on this episode about Misinformation.

ALL EPISODES WILL BE AVAILABLE ON PATREON.
This one is here https://www.patreon.com/posts/misinformation-148802284

FULL EPISODE ON PATREON at https://www.patreon.com/posts/misinformation-148802284

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How do we quantify misinformation?

Thank you to Prof. Joshua A. Tucker for joining us on this episode about Misinformation.

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How do you measure democracy? Are these standards reasonable, onerous, empirical, propagandistic, unscientific or quantifiable?

Welcome to Political Reality. In this intro episode we explain why we wanted this podcast to exist.

Our daily lives seem increasingly overwhelmed by polarization, misinformation and dubious culture wars while we face countless serious problems that require thoughtful and evidence-based solutions. To more forward we need a shared reality of facts and reason with an equally shared dedication to democracy and fairness. The Political Reality podcast is here to fill that void – diving into how politics and governments work, how to make them work better, how to navigate the dizzying world of political information, and how to better understand and approach the “other side”. We can find a shared political reality, if we are willing.