Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall this month. The aim was to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and, in the words of organizer Josh Pasek, “why those processes matter for whether or not we remain a democracy.”
So how did we get to this point?
This is the first of two posts that will answer this question.
Teach-in presentations by political scientists Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey gave complimentary accounts: Speaking on American public opinion, Hutchings shared the key insight that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Mickey’s talk, the subject of our forthcoming post (Part 2), focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something different.”
The Racial Divide
Decades of research on American public opinion may help us to understand the results of this election and others, Hutchings said, by correcting a common assumption that Americans pay attention to politics and cast votes based on ideology and policies.
“American voters are woefully uninformed about politics,” Hutchings said. Only about 20% of voters are familiar with the ideological terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and a significant minority – maybe even a majority, depending on how you count– don’t know which party is the more conservative party. “You might think that is hyperbole,” said Hutchings. “I assure you, it is not.”
The perspective they do employ, said Hutchings, is one that focuses on “salient social groups.”
(Of note, the American National Election Studies, which has surveyed voters in every election since 1948, is a leading source of what we know about the U.S. electorate; Hutchings was a former principal investigator on the project.)
Politicians play to grievances, fears, and stereotypes, leveraging divisions based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality to build coalitions.
“Perhaps the most salient social group– certainly the most persistent and consistent in terms of its political impact– has been racial groups: In particular, attitudes about Black Americans,” said Hutchings. “It is, after all, the issue around which we had the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War. It’s the group around which we had the largest social movement in the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement. And it’s the issue around which we had the largest social movement of the 21st century: Black Lives Matter.”
“The racial divide is the biggest divide in American politics,” said Hutchings. It is the foundation of our current party system that, since the 1960s, has pitted one party that was “mostly the champion of civil rights, sometimes reluctantly,” against the party that was not.
“I’m not here to make a moral claim,” said Hutchings, “but I am here to make a factual claim that race is the chief dividing point in American politics. …If we want to get a sense of how we arrived at this point we’re at now in our political collective lives, we can’t ignore race.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To win future elections, Democrats would need to mobilize non-white voters without alienating white voters, while Republicans will confront the “diminishing number of angry white men,” said Hutchings. We can expect politicians to continue to prey on social divisions in the electorate: “They’re going to keep doing it as long as you keep responding to it,” he said.
Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mickey, Hutchings, and Pasek are all affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey.
The second administration of President Donald Trump has opened with a cyclone of directives that many political scientists view as a threat to American democracy. The shuttering of departments and entities created by Congress, the attempt to shift the Congressional “power of the purse” to the executive branch, and the firing of Inspectors General charged with oversight of the executive are examples among a dizzying set of actions that have raised alarms and, in many cases, been challenged in the courts. Most recently, Trump signed a sweeping executive order seeking to bring agencies such as the FTC and SEC, set up by Congress to act independently, under more direct control of the president.
Congress is designed, among other things, to write laws and oversee the actions of the federal bureaucracy to make sure that agencies execute the laws faithfully. Under the control of a GOP firmly in the grips of Donald Trump, Congress has been virtually silent as the president seeks to expand executive power at the expense of congressional authority.
Political scientists Charlotte Cavaillé and Robert Mickey, both affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, shared their insights on Congress’s “missing” push-back at last week’s “teach-in” panel organized by Josh Pasek and faculty to help students understand the democratic process.
Talks presented by Cavaillé and Mickey suggested three reasons why Republicans in Congress have declined to resist. First, they support the policy goals; second, they aren’t worried about popular backlash; and last, they fear for their electability (and possibly their well-being) if they defy Trump.
Cavaillé opened with the argument that Trump 2.0 is using very popular policy goals to clash with the courts.
“Trump is a very smart politician, so he’s focusing on extremely popular goals,” said Cavaillé. The downsizing of federal government and the slashing of foreign aid are such widely supported policy goals that legislators might view them as ends that justify the means.
Second, members of Congress worry about backlash when it comes to supporting policy. Republicans in Congress will worry about backlash only if the consequences affect their own voter base and are “large, certain, and traceable,” Cavaillé said. “…Right now it’s such a mess that it’s hard to understand even what’s going on.”
In a talk that described how political history since the Civil War brought us to this moment, Robert Mickey suggested a third explanation for Congressional abdication: Unprecedented fear of reprisal.
“Congressional Republicans [now] refuse to conduct oversight of the executive when their own party is present,” said Mickey. On one front, they are pressured by the power Trump and Elon Musk hold to back a primary challenger to defeat them. Worse, “as the ones who are about to retire keep telling us, they’re also fearful of the threats of violence that they and their families are receiving from the current of violence on the extreme right,” said Mickey. “So it kind of is understandable that they’re being quiet.”
An article this week by Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, made the same point: “The most underestimated element in the current crisis of our democracy is the degree to which many politicians fear for their lives if they do anything forthright to cross or defy President Trump.”
Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Robert Mickey is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. They are both affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.
The teach-in held at Angell Hall was attended by an estimated 400-500 students seeking to learn about U.S. political institutions. The event also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965, also at Angell Hall. Participating scholars included Kenneth Lowande, Vincent Hutchings, Josh Pasek, Richard Primus, Salomé Viljoen, Jenna Bednar, Julian Davis Mortenson, and Devin Judge-Lord. Most talks are now available to watch on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Charlotte Cavaillé and Robert Mickey.
Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders – more than 70 of them– that include controversial directives on immigration, the slashing of foreign aid, and the reshaping of the federal government. Organizations defending the rule of law have sounded the alarm that the orders breach constitutional separation of powers and violate due process, and many have already been challenged in court. Is this storm of executive orders unique? And in the end, will this strategy succeed? Kenneth Lowande, a political scientist affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, is an expert on executive power, and the author of the recently published book, ““False Front: The Failed Promise Of Presidential Power In A Polarized Age.”
As part of a “teach-in” panel organized by Josh Pasek and faculty to help students understand what’s happening, Lowande argued that the executive orders of the Trump administration are unprecedented because they are illegal power grabs by design, and that their success depends critically on compliance.
A bit of background: Executive orders are presidential instructions that direct executive branch agencies and staff to take specific actions. Presidents often use executive orders to kick off their first 100 days in office to revoke executive orders of previous administrations and to signal they’ll make good on the promises of their campaign.
Lowande has argued that it is normal for politicians to pursue executive actions, even when they know they will fail. Unilateral solutions are often inefficient, short-lived, or empty, but presidents issue the orders to put on a compelling show for key constituencies. It is also normal, says Lowande, for presidents– Republicans and Democrats– to use ambiguous laws to change policy.
What we are seeing in 2025 is different in two ways, Lowande says. The first difference, he argues, is that political wins for the Trump administration are the first and most important objective.
“Today, they’ve hastened the expansion of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which will cost orders of magnitude more to construct than normal. They released reservoir water in California for no conceivable purpose. They attempted to freeze all federal spending without a good warning of preparation. Any president could have done those things,” said Lowande. “But for the second Trump administration, making political wins seems to be the point. The volume and pace [of executive action] is designed to give you the impression that Trump can do anything.”
The second difference, says Lowande, is that the executive orders appear to be designed to be illegal. “President Trump today is not fundamentally different than he was eight years ago,” said Lowande. “He doesn’t have different ideas about policy. The main difference is that he’s surrounded by people who will sign off on actions even when they suspect that their actions might later be determined to be unlawful.”
In a statement issued last week, the nonpartisan American Bar Association cited attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship; the dismantling of USAID; attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity, and the summary dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress as examples of “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.”
To take effect, an executive order must be “founded on the authority of the president derived from the Constitution or statute.” And to be exercised, an executive order must in the end be carried out by a bureaucrat. The Trump administration has opened the game with a strategy of moving first and furiously with orders that are legally risky. The enforcement of those orders may in turn be costly: Opening up dozens of different policy processes has the potential to tax the time and energy of staff. According to Lowande, we can assume that the administration hopes the federal workforce will follow those orders without being forced.
“The success of President Trump’s executive actions depends on people believing,” said Lowande. “It depends on courts, businesses, this university and other organizations acting as if the president actually has the power that he claims to.”
Media narratives that describe the president steamrolling Washington are effectively creating the narrative the President and his advisors need for their strategy to be successful, said Lowande.
An opposing strategy would depend on accurate knowledge about the limitations of executive power. The opposition would need to force the administration to use its energy to make people comply with their directives. And in the face of risk, the people asked to comply would need to draw on their courage.
Kenneth Lowande is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Associate Professor of Public Policy (by courtesy), and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.
The teach-in held at Angell Hall during last week’s snowstorm was attended by an estimated 400-500 students seeking to learn about U.S. political institutions. The event also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965, also at Angell Hall.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Kenneth Lowande.
Still, there is abundant evidence to suggest that encampments represent much more than just riled up college students chanting provocative slogans. Beyond tents and sleeping areas, many encampments feature Liberation Libraries, communal art-making, and worship spaces for Jewish and Muslim participants. At the University of Michigan, students from the TAHRIR coalition have organized daily programming including teach-ins, external speaker events, documentary screenings, and broader community education initiatives.
Starting and maintaining encampments is costly activism, requiring time, resources, and a willingness to endure bodily harm and legal repercussions. All of these costs should in principle reduce the likelihood of activism. But activists remain steadfast to their demands and actions, despite what we may expect. How can we better understand this wave of committed activism for Palestine?
Many Americans, I argue, are driven to political action by what can be called their prosocial politics, or their disposition to help groups in need. In what follows, I show the prevalence of prosocial politics as a driver of participation and how partisanship conditions the types of groups that Americans consider “in need.”
The Politics of Helping Others
Studying what mobilizes citizens to participate in politics is a foundational question to social scientists. Traditionally, this research analyzes citizens at the level of the individual. According to the “economic model,” individuals are essentially self-interested actors, and how they understand the costs and benefits of action determines whether they will participate. In the civic voluntarism model, an individual’s level of education, money, and time also make participation more likely.
However, more recent research shows the importance of group participation norms in determining likelihood of participation. Individuals who hold a norm of helping those in need are more likely to participate in higher-cost political participation. Psychology research on prosociality echoes the importance of helping as a cultural value, and an innate human behavior. If helping others is so important to human societies, how can we incorporate the desire to help into our models of political participation?
To answer this question, I offer a new theory called the “prosocial politics model.” In this model, citizens’ participation in politics is driven by how much they see helping others as a political value. The influence of this value is particularly strengthened by clarity around which groups are in need, and which groups are in power. As such, in the prosocial politics model, when citizens encounter a political situation they make automatic appraisals about three things:
Whether helping others through politics matters to them
Whether the group in question needs help, and
Whether to take political action to help a group.
To establish evidence of the model in action, I created a measurement of prosocial political preferences in the form of six survey questions. I asked about civic prosocial norms and how helping is tied to politics in questions like, “In elections, how important do you think it is to vote in order to help others?” and “How much do you think politicians should focus on helping groups who are usually ignored?”
I fielded the prosocial political preferences questions in three separate national surveys of Americans, totaling 4,555 interviews. Across these surveys, I find that Americans on average have moderate to high scores on the scale (0.6 out of a 0-1). Additionally, I find that these political preferences are distinct from existing similar measures, such as group empathy, humanitarianism and egalitarianism, and generalized beliefs about helping others. Using a regression analysis, I find that prosocial political preferences outpace other common predictors, such as an individual’s age, their education, and their level of partisan identity strength.
Palestinians as a Group in Need
Another element of the prosocial politics model is social perception. Americans should be more responsive to a specific group, such as Palestinians, if they perceive that group to be in need– also known as the normative altruism model. Perceptions about need are not created in a vacuum. People rely on social groups to learn norms of helping obligation: the type of groups who should receive help, what the helping should look like, and the social stakes of helping. Public policy, such as welfare, also influences how we perceive the power and deservingness of groups.
In the United States, political parties heavily shape and are shaped by the social identities of their members. As a result, I expect that partisanship modifies how Americans come to perceive which groups are in need, and which groups are not. To test this part of my theory, I piloted another novel measure called the “Circles of Power and Need,” or CPN for short. The CPN measure solicits a total of 12 text answers from each survey participant, six in Power and six in Need. With a team of undergraduates, I created a coding scheme to capture the breadth and nuance in how Americans describe stratification. We used 23 characteristic categories, and assigned binary values to organize text answers from respondents.
Through this analysis, we find that Americans use multiple dimensions to discuss Power and Need. Three characteristics are the most salient across the CPN measure: Class, Race and Ethnicity, and Institutions. Americans think about power in terms of institutions, parties and ideology groups, corporations, and class. When Americans think about need, they think in terms of class, employment status and racial/ethnic groups.
How Does Partisanship Shape Perceptions?
Democrats are overwhelmingly more likely to discuss groups in need in terms of race, ethnicity, and immigration status, while Republicans more frequently associate need with children, the disabled, and veterans. Republicans and Democrats both associate power and need with class, but Democrats reference ethnoracial and minority groups, such as Black people, White people, Hispanics, immigrants, and LGBTQ+.
The Political Consequences of Prosocial Politics
Images of Palestinian civilians killed as a result of Israeli military aggression have sparked protest, voting campaigns, and political activism. As of early May, 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military campaign in the past six months, including 17,000 children. Millions in Palestine are at risk of starvation as a result of alleged war crimes. Several legal experts refer to Israel’s actions as a genocide, increasing global urgency about assisting civilians at risk.
Public disagreements about the justification of Israel’s actions may not change the mobilizing effect of a steady stream of images of civilians dying, especially groups that are publicly considered more in need. Children, women, healthcare workers, foreign aid workers, educators, emergency responders, and journalists are all categories of people that are usually seen by the public as more deserving of help than other categories of people (e.g., soldiers, elected officials).
Americans protesting for the plight of Palestinians connect their cause to global justice problems like climate change, violence against indigenous populations, racism and policing. The breadth of these causes likely influences prosocial norms for Palestine, especially among youth who may have participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in their adolescence.
Prosocial politics may shed some light on why pro-Palestinian activism is so prevalent among young students, who are more likely to align themselves with the Democratic party, but have higher disapproval rates for Biden’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in compared to their older copartisans (81% among 18-34 year olds, compared to 53% among all Democrats). In my dissertation, I also investigate how the absence of prosocial political preferences makes a difference in mobilization among individuals with different political attitudes, or issue positions. Additionally, I qualitatively study the prevalence of helping narratives in how Americans describe their own protest participation in 2020-2021.
Student activists likely have consolidated clear ideas about Palestinians as a group in need of help, and feel morally compelled to assist them in any way they can. According to recent polling from Gall Sigler and Daniel Hopkins, younger Americans express greater sympathy for Palestinians than older Americans. This is one of many political generational divides.
For college students, demanding financial divestment from companies sustaining military action is a tactic with historical precedence. Young student activists are not alone in this conviction. Understanding solidarity activism through the lens of prosocial politics clarifies the puzzle of why so many Americans are overcoming the costs of engaging in political action– especially since protest can be an effective means of recourse for disadvantaged groups to enact political change.
Pro-Palestine activism around the world has brought the suffering of Gazans to the attention of mainstream media, setting an agenda for the upcoming presidential election. Even if campus encampments are dispersed by police, counter-protestors, or administrators, U.S. military support for Israel will likely be a salient issue for many young Americans. Future research should consider how helping others as a political value challenges common understandings of what drives political participation.
Key Takeaways:
The prosocial politics model offers a new way to understand why people decide to engage in political action.
Prosocial political preferences, or the extent to which people see helping others as a political value, is a powerful predictor of political action.
Exploring the nuance in how people conceptualize others in need can clarify situations where people may or may not be driven to action.
Partisan cues and social norms affect whom we see as people in need. Although class signifies need across parties, Democrats bring up race and ethnicity more than Republicans, who typically mention age groups, such as children or the elderly.
Through the lens of prosocial politics, we can understand the recent wave of committed activism as motivated by a desire to help Palestinians suffering in Gaza. U.S. military aid to Israel will be a salient issue for Americans in the 2024 presidential election.
Eugenia Quintanilla is an American Politics doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of the Garth Taylor Dissertation Award for Public Opinion– an ISR Next Generation award granted by the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. She broadly studies political psychology, race and ethnic politics, and public opinion. Her current scholarship investigates questions about how politics and the desire to help others intersect to influence political behavior. She also studies American attitudes about wealth inequality, Latino political socialization, and racial attitudes.
Tevah Platt, communications specialist for the Center for Political Studies, contributed to the development of this post. Photos from William Lopez and Tevah Platt.
A major challenge confronting our society is the intensity of partisan disagreements, even about what constitutes fact. To address this challenge, fact-checking was initiated by organizations such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact in the 2000s to assess the accuracy of political claims. For fact-checking journalism to be helpful, there should be widespread public trust in such websites. Yet about half of Americans believe fact-checkers are biased.
Two decades after its emergence, why has fact-checking failed to get traction among the public? What changes can help fact-checking sites earn greater trust?
Research shows that FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Washington Post Fact Checker in recent years often corrected Republicans at a greater rate than Democrats. These asymmetries indicate a specific way in which fact-checkers pursue objectivity. Unlike traditional journalism that in principle seeks objectivity by covering all sides equally, fact-checking’s coverage decisions are guided by what is consistent with the best available evidence. Thus, fact-checking sites at times disproportionally critique one party more often than the other as guided by evidence. However, this approach poses a dilemma. Their asymmetric coverage may reflect genuine imbalances in reality, but it can also undermine trust in fact-checking sites among partisans.
To examine how asymmetric coverage affects partisans’ source credibility perceptions, I conducted a survey experiment in 2020. Participants were asked to assess a news source based on a set of headlines where the majority of headlines challenged 1) Republicans, 2) Democrats, or 3) both parties equally (baseline condition). The condition where most headlines challenged Republicans was considered as uncongenial to Republicans and congenial to Democrats (vice versa for the condition in which most headlines challenged Democrats).
The results indicate that partisans perceive a source to be less credible when its coverage corrects their own party more often than the other (uncongenial asymmetry, i.e., most headlines challenge in-group), compared to when the source corrects each party at a similar rate. Contrary to popular belief that Republicans tend to be more resistant to uncongenial news and facts, Democrats reacted more negatively to uncongenial asymmetric coverage than Republicans. Even when a source challenged the opposite party more often (congenial asymmetry, i.e., most headlines challenge out-group), partisans found the source to be less credible than symmetric coverage. In fact, the results show that partisans found congenial asymmetry to be particularly less credible when a portion of coverage challenged their own party on a highly polarized topic such as immigration, which is the type of issue that fact-checking sites often cover.
This study highlights a difficult dilemma that fact-checkers face in their coverage decisions. While asymmetric coverage of political parties is at times needed in response to evidence, it can alienate partisans from both sides. We might believe that balance for its own sake should be avoided, but more symmetric coverage of political parties and further efforts to signal nonpartisanship can help build broader public trust in fact-checking sites.
Hwayong Shin is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan. Her research investigates ways to mitigate the partisan divide and build common ground by increasing the credibility of evidence-based information and by invoking shared emotions and experiences. Shin is a Next Generation scholar at ISR’s Center for Political Studies and was awarded the 2022 Garth Taylor Fellowship in Public Opinion.
In order to track and share data on events unfolding in Ukraine, Yuri Zhukov, Associate Professor of Political Science and Research Associate Professor at the Center for Political Studies, launched VIINA: Violent Incident Information from News Articles on the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. VIINA is a near-real time multi-source event data system for the invasion.
“I wanted to make these data available immediately because media sites in both countries are already being shut down, due to either censorship (in Russia) or military operations (in Ukraine),” said Zhukov. “It is thus essential that researchers have access to information about the war, as reported across media organizations and other actors in the information space.” While different media cover different types of events, VIINA’s multi-source approach will capture a more accurate picture of events as they unfold.
This platform allows researchers to access data based on news reports from Ukrainian and Russian media, which have been geocoded and classified into standard conflict event categories through machine learning.
VIINA is freely available for use by students, journalists, policymakers, and researchers. Using an automated web scraping routine that runs every 6 hours, VIINA extracts the text of news reports published by each source and their associated metadata, including publication time and date, web urls. GIS-ready data can be downloaded from VIINA, with temporal precision down to the minute.
VIINA draws on news reports from a variety of Ukrainian and Russian news providers. Data sources currently include news wires, TV stations, newspapers, and online publications in both countries. Zhukov plans to expand these sources as the conflict unfolds, to include OSINT social media feeds and other key sources. The set of sources may also change as the war unfolds — due to interruptions to journalistic activity from military operations, cyber attacks, and state censorship, as well as the availability of new data from other information providers.
Still, there is abundant evidence to suggest that encampments represent much more than just riled up college students chanting 
Prosocial politics may shed some light on why pro-Palestinian activism is so prevalent among young students, who are more likely to align themselves with the Democratic party, but have 
Eugenia Quintanilla is an American Politics doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of the Garth Taylor Dissertation Award for Public Opinion– an ISR Next Generation award granted by the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. She broadly studies political psychology, race and ethnic politics, and public opinion. Her current scholarship investigates questions about how politics and the desire to help others intersect to influence political behavior. She also studies American attitudes about wealth inequality, Latino political socialization, and racial attitudes. 
