Markus Prior studies how ordinary people engage with politics: how politics motivates them, what they know about it, and what policies and outcomes they prefer. He currently studies the time horizons of individuals’ evaluations of costs and benefits. One goal is to measure “policy patience,” the extent to which people accept policies with immediate costs and delayed collective benefits.
Prior is the author of Hooked: How Politics Captures People’s Interest(Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections(Cambridge University Press, 2007). Hooked analyzes why some people develop greater political interest than others. The project drew on public opinion surveys from the United States and several European countries that followed individuals for several decades. Hooked received the 2020 Robert E. Lane Award and the 2020 Juliette and Alexander George Book Award.
Post-Broadcast Democracy examines how broadcast television, cable television, and the Internet changed politics in the United States by affecting how people learn, who learns, and who votes. The book explained how greater media choice caused electoral polarization. Post-Broadcast Democracy won the 2009 Goldsmith Book Prize and the 2010 Doris Graber Award for the “best book on political communication in the last 10 years.” Prior’s work has also appeared in leading journals.
His project, “What Do They Want and When Do They Want It? Political Patience and Its Role in Partisan Polarization,” considers that supporters within a political party often agree which policies they want, but are they unified in their policy patience? And do they agree when the policies should begin? If some in-partisans prefer delayed implementation, and some out-partisans are willing to support the policy as long as it begins in the future, then policy patience could be a cross-cutting cleavage that diminishes overall partisan polarization.
May 2024
