What if people who watch Fox News watched CNN instead? | No. 191 – April 10, 2022

An ambitious social-science experiment raises alarms for democracies with popular partisan media outlets

Welcome to the first weekly edition of Democracy by the Numbers, a rebrand of my blog to make it more directly compatible with the core themes of STRENGTH IN NUMBERS, my book on polls and democracy which comes out this summer. Some readers will have noticed the soft launch of this title in a recent newsletter on fake polling data “collected” in Iraq from 2006 on. And I have sent another post on the global political realignment away from class divides and onto educational attainment, which has led to the rise of politicians such as Donald Trump in America and Marine Le Pen in France. That was a fun one to write.

While the content of this newsletter will remain the same, the framing will become a bit more democracy-oriented. We will still talk about voter psychology, voting behavior, elections, and public opinion more broadly — but always with representation and the will of the people in the back of our minds. Democracy by the Numbers is about numbers, sure, as this blog has been, but al…