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John Sides

John Sides is professor of political science and William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair at Vanderbilt University. He studies political behavior in US and comparative politics. He is an author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and The Battle for the Meaning of America (with Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck; Princeton University Press, 2018), and The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election and Campaigns and Election: Rules, Reality, Strategy, Choice (with Lynn Vavreck, Princeton University Press, 2015). He has published articles in various scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. Sides helped found and serves as publisher of The Monkey Cage, a site about political science and politics at the Washington Post. He has also written for such outlets as FiveThirtyEight, the Boston Review, Bloomberg View, CNN, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. He also serves as research advisor to the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.
He received his BA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and his MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He previously taught at the University of Texas-Austin and George Washington University.

Latest posts

What Pessimistic Takes on Americans’ Willingness to Fight Covid-19 Get Wrong

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In this contribution to “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, John Sides interrogates the common assumption that Americans’ love of freedom and anti-authoritarian streak is behind resistance to enacting public health measures to fight Covid-19. Beyond the fact that significant majorities of Americans support and follow these measures, Sides also examines the role that political leaders play in shaping the views of those who resist behavior change. This is especially the case among some (but not all) Republicans given the messages from President Trump and party leaders.

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October 22, 2020
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