{"id":11,"date":"2018-12-11T00:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T00:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=podcast&p=11"},"modified":"2020-11-16T19:45:57","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T19:45:57","slug":"episode-2-the-government-citizen-disconnect-with-suzanne-mettler","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast\/episode-2-the-government-citizen-disconnect-with-suzanne-mettler\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 2: The Government-Citizen Disconnect with Suzanne Mettler"},"content":{"rendered":"
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E.J. Fagan, Christine Bird, and Brooke Shannon interview Professor Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University on her new book, The Government-Citizen Disconnect<\/a>. They talk about policy feedback, policy design, and U.S. social policy.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"E.J. Fagan, Christine Bird, and Brooke Shannon interview Professor Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University on her new book, The Government-Citizen Disconnect. They talk about policy feedback, policy design, and U.S. social policy.","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2018\/12\/18-12-05-The-Policy-Agenda-Ep.-2-Final.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"28.15M","filesize_raw":"29513888","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[14,10,11,12,13],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-11","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-democracy","6":"tag-political-science","7":"tag-politics","8":"tag-public-policy","9":"tag-welfare","10":"series-the-policy-agenda","11":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":613,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-07-01 18:02:41","post_date_gmt":"2020-07-01 18:02:41","post_content":"\n

Fagan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He studies political parties, Congress, think tanks, agenda setting, lobbying, and economic policy. In particular, he is interested in how legislatures process information and solve problems, and how party elites influence policy. He is also a graduate research fellow and former project manager with the Policy Agendas Project<\/a>. He produces and co-hosts the Policy Agendas Podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before graduate school, Fagan worked for five years in Washington, DC. From 2011-2014, he was Deputy Communications Director for Global Financial Integrity<\/a> (GFI), a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. GFI works to study and curtail illicit financial flows from developing countries. <\/p>\n","post_title":"E. J. Fagan","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"e-j-fagan","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-23 16:53:07","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=613","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":634,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-10-27 15:44:56","post_date_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:44:56","post_content":"\n

Christine\u2019s research lies at the intersection of law and politics. Her dissertation work examines the policy agenda of the Solicitor General and the separation of powers dynamics at play in Supreme Court litigation. She specializes in judicial politics, constitutional law, and how law interacts with public policy. She plans to complete her PhD in Political Science in May of 2021 at the University of Texas at Austin. Christine holds a juris doctorate and a license to practice law in her home state, Oklahoma.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Christine Bird","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"christine-bird","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-27 15:44:56","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:44:56","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=634","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":638,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-10-27 15:48:58","post_date_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:48:58","post_content":"\n

Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in research on local and urban policy, agendas, and Latinx politics.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Brooke Shannon","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"brooke-shannon","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-27 15:48:59","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:48:59","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=638","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":565,"post_author":"38","post_date":"2020-06-30 19:16:51","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-30 19:16:51","post_content":"\n

Suzanne Mettler\u00a0<\/strong>is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the\u00a0Government Department at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests include American political development, inequality, public policy, political behavior, and democracy.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Suzanne Mettler","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"suzanne-mettler","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-10-27 15:50:10","post_modified_gmt":"2020-10-27 15:50:10","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/?post_type=speaker&p=565","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

Hello. Welcome to the second episode of the Policy Agendas podcast. I’m E.J. Fagin,<\/p>\n

the project manager of the Policy Agendas Project. Today, I am joined by two wonderful<\/p>\n

co-hosts. The first is Christine Bird, Esquire. I don’t go by Esquire because my mother<\/p>\n

would be embarrassed. But Christine Bird Christine Bird will soon be Dr. Christine Bird, Esquire, which<\/p>\n

is a wonderful dual title. And Brooke Shannon. Hello. No, Esquire. No Esquire. Yeah.<\/p>\n

So. So we just record a great episode. So I would ask Christine what was on the agenda? What is<\/p>\n

on the agenda for this episode? So today we talk to Suzanne Mettler, the author of The Government’s Citizen Disconnect,<\/p>\n

as her newest book. It just came out in 2013. And it’s a follow up to a previous book called<\/p>\n

The Submerged State that I think she published in 2009. In this book, she goes into why<\/p>\n

citizens have particular views about social policy that they interact with and how that relates<\/p>\n

to their participation in government. And so we had a great conversation her coming up.<\/p>\n

It was a great experience, Brooke. Yeah, some of the takeaways I found from Mettler<\/p>\n

were just fascinating how this book builds on the submerged state. So when it came out in 2011,<\/p>\n

it really focused on like the earned income tax credit, the Affordable Care Act and things like these tax<\/p>\n

policies that are sort of like muddled by the government, so much so that people don’t really know what they are<\/p>\n

and how they they fit into everyday people’s lives. And discussing<\/p>\n

with Dr. Mettler about how these policies translate into like who gets elected, how<\/p>\n

people view their own participation and efficacy in government, how the government works for them.<\/p>\n

I think is especially prescient right now, given the midterms that we just passed,<\/p>\n

that given the state of American politics. But yeah, I think there were a lot of takeaways in terms of policy prescriptions,<\/p>\n

what’s possible in government and what’s possible and participation. It was a fantastic interview.<\/p>\n

Yeah. I really am excited for it. And they’ll come. I mean, just have a few kind of low clerical things before we do that.<\/p>\n

This is a new podcast. This is you. You’re listening right now to the second episode. First episode as we’re recording, this is not<\/p>\n

yet out. We’re not too sure how many of you are listening. But if you are listening, as one ask, you do a couple of things.<\/p>\n

Number one, you can give us a rating on i-Tunes that helps it so that when people search for policy agenda on i-Tunes,<\/p>\n

they have Laura Ingram show come up first, which is currently what comes up first. So we’d love for that not to happen. I<\/p>\n

don’t accidentally click on that one, please. The second thing we’d like you to do is to share it with your colleagues, with<\/p>\n

your friends, with your students, people that, you know, we’re going to be doing quite a few these podcasts. We think we have about 4<\/p>\n

in the pipeline right now. We’re recording our next one in November and we’re excited to share this with the world.<\/p>\n

We love your feedback. Our email is policy agendas, plural at Gmail dot com and on<\/p>\n

Twitter we are at policy agendas. And we’d love to know, you know, what work should be cover. What kind of question<\/p>\n

should we ask? Are we doing something wrong? Is my voice knowing all of those things we’d love to know and are looking<\/p>\n

forward to doing this podcast with you. So with that, here is Professor Suzanne Mettler.<\/p>\n

We’re now joined by Professor Suzanne Mettler, she’s the Clinton Rossiter professor of American institutions<\/p>\n

and the government department at Cornell University and the author of The Government Says and Disconnect.<\/p>\n

Suzanne, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I’m delighted to be chatting with you. Yeah, we are. We’re really excited<\/p>\n

to talk about this book. This book is in many ways a follow up to the submerged state. In many<\/p>\n

ways a pretty large extension of the submerged state going into some areas that died of that book do.<\/p>\n

We’d like to start by asking you, can you summarize this book for our audience? Yes, certainly.<\/p>\n

So what I look at in this book is, well, I did kind of a big overview<\/p>\n

of what does the American welfare state look like these days in terms of<\/p>\n

who’s covered by policies, how many policies does the average person experience<\/p>\n

and how does it all add up? And what I came to is a paradox.<\/p>\n

And I call that the government’s citizen disconnect. And what I mean by that is that there is<\/p>\n

a growing gulf between the role that government actually plays in Americans lives<\/p>\n

and their overall assessment and response to it. So what I found<\/p>\n

is that the average person has used several social policies<\/p>\n

from the federal government across the course of their lives. But<\/p>\n

despite that and you know, this is this has been growing over time and it’s more common than it was<\/p>\n

in the past to it to a very large extent. And it cuts across all sorts<\/p>\n

of boundaries by income group and partisanship and age group, et cetera,<\/p>\n

and geographically cuts across all areas of the United States.<\/p>\n

And yet people have very poor assessments of government<\/p>\n

on all sorts of indicators that survey researchers have tracked over time, like trust in government<\/p>\n

and what we call in political science, political efficacy, external efficacy, people’s<\/p>\n

view about whether government is responsive to people like them. Their<\/p>\n

view about whether public officials care about people like them, etc. On all of these measures,<\/p>\n

in the middle of the 20th century, Americans had pretty positive views of government<\/p>\n

and it’s been declining over time. It declined a lot in the late 1960s, early 1970s<\/p>\n

around Vietnam and Watergate, etc. But what’s so paradoxical now<\/p>\n

is that in recent decades Americans have come to rely upon government more than ever<\/p>\n

and yet still have these very low and increasingly low assessments of government.<\/p>\n

OK, so your previous work for Samaj State addressed some of these issues, but in a much more narrow fashion.<\/p>\n

So could you explain the differences between the two books? Yes. So in a submerged state,<\/p>\n

I’d been working on this larger project already. And then during when I was<\/p>\n

trying to understand what was happening with the Obama administration, I ended up writing that short book, The<\/p>\n

Submerged State. And in it, I developed this concept of policies<\/p>\n

that are submerged by their design that makes it difficult<\/p>\n

for for people to realize that government is helping them with<\/p>\n

social benefits. In most cases, these policies that I call submerged are channeled through<\/p>\n

the tax code, their tax expenditures and some of them have other designs,<\/p>\n

such as I called student loans submerged up through their<\/p>\n

private banks. And then there are policies like employer provided health and retirement<\/p>\n

benefits that combine private organizations actually channeling<\/p>\n

policies, but they’re subsidized by government through the tax code. So<\/p>\n

I really explored that concept in that book and here I build on it<\/p>\n

in the government’s citizen disconnect because I’m really puzzled by<\/p>\n

why we have this disconnect. And I thought that it would come down to policy design<\/p>\n

in which policy whether people had experienced policies that were mostly submerged or<\/p>\n

had more visible designs. And I find that, you know, that is the case.<\/p>\n

People who used mostly submerged policies have no bearing that<\/p>\n

I can tell on their attitudes about government. And so their attitudes about government are driven by<\/p>\n

other things. But even people who’ve used lots of visible policies.<\/p>\n

What I found in this book and really surprised me is that even those experiences<\/p>\n

don’t seem to affect their attitudes about government very much.<\/p>\n

So in this book, I lay out broadly what people’s experiences of government<\/p>\n

add up to the numbers of policies and types of policies they’ve used. And then I try to delve<\/p>\n

into that question of why is there this disconnect? And I also look at.<\/p>\n

The relationship between peoples use of different policies and their participation<\/p>\n

in politics are not what we’re segway right to talking, but about participation.<\/p>\n

You know, given that we’ve we’ve had a recent election that has some interesting, I think things to say the Earth<\/p>\n

science to this book. I think, Christiane, this is gonna take us away there. Yes. This book, the government’s citizen<\/p>\n

disconnect, actually draws a connection between the disconnect and the<\/p>\n

not understanding the submerged state and voting behavior. So you do a survey,<\/p>\n

but you draw data from for this book. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you made that connection.<\/p>\n

Yeah, that’s right. Now, when I probe the relationship to political participation<\/p>\n

in this book, I’m not making causal arguments. I didn’t have the data<\/p>\n

that would allow me to do that. And there are various scholars now who are are<\/p>\n

finding ways to do that, exploring, you know, one policy at a time. But here<\/p>\n

I’m trying to kind of look at how people’s aggregated experiences over time matter.<\/p>\n

And so I’m looking at relationships. And what I find is that there<\/p>\n

is a participatory tilt when it comes to voting and all kinds of other political participation<\/p>\n

as well. And that is that the people who participate the most in politics<\/p>\n

are people who have used plenty of social policies, but policies with these<\/p>\n

submerged designs and these tend to be people who are not thinking<\/p>\n

much at all about how government has helped them personally. And they<\/p>\n

also tend to be less supportive of expanding social<\/p>\n

policies. By contrast, people who used lots of visible policies are the<\/p>\n

most likely to be aware of government’s role in their own lives, at least along a couple of dimensions.<\/p>\n

And they also, having used more of these policies, is a determinant<\/p>\n

of being more supportive of more generous social policies generally and expanding,<\/p>\n

expanding health care provision and so on. But those people with<\/p>\n

those attitudes are much less likely to participate in politics. They’re less likely to<\/p>\n

vote. They’re less likely to do all kinds of other things that we track in surveys. So<\/p>\n

there’s this participatory tilt. And, you know, the voices that elected<\/p>\n

officials hear from and the voices that actually choose those elected officials are a<\/p>\n

biased group in that respect. So speaking about health care and<\/p>\n

social policy in particular, we just had an election. And<\/p>\n

one of the surprising, I think takeaways from the 2010 midterms was the amount of states<\/p>\n

that in fact voted to expand Medicaid. And there were some surprises in the states that did it<\/p>\n

based on the government’s ideological tilt and the typical view that we have of the citizens<\/p>\n

in those states. Can you speak on that a little bit? Was that a surprise for you that Medicaid<\/p>\n

would be sort of embraced and these are at least the expansions would occur<\/p>\n

in these types of states? I’m delighted to speak about this. And this draws<\/p>\n

my answer here is going to draw on a combination of this book that I’ve just written<\/p>\n

and also my ongoing work with Larry Jacobs about the Affordable Care<\/p>\n

Act. We’ve been doing the panel study since 2010 and we’re looking at policy<\/p>\n

feedback effects of it. And the results of the election<\/p>\n

could be very well predicted by the insights from these two projects<\/p>\n

combined. So in the book that I’ve just written, the Government Citizen Disconnect,<\/p>\n

I’m not looking at policy feedback effects in the way people usually do when they’re looking at<\/p>\n

a policy. For example, the way Andrea Campbell did in her work on Social Security and Medicare.<\/p>\n

And there she’s looking at whether people become more active in politics<\/p>\n

with an eye toward expanding and preserving and protecting that particular<\/p>\n

policy that benefits them. And, you know, those kinds of feedback effects<\/p>\n

do occur with various different policies. And we’re seeing more research about that all the time.<\/p>\n

What I was doing in this book was looking at whether people extrapolate further<\/p>\n

from their policy experiences toward government generally and whether it affects their attitudes<\/p>\n

about government generally. And I found that that doesn’t happen very much.<\/p>\n

People don’t connect the dots. And what we saw in this election really reflects<\/p>\n

this kind of disjuncture where we saw that in various<\/p>\n

red states where people elected Republicans to send them back<\/p>\n

to the Senate. And these are people who have said for years that they want to repeal the Affordable Care<\/p>\n

Act. They’re sending those folks back to office. And yet at the same time,<\/p>\n

they were voting, too, for their own states to adopt, expand. Did Medicaid<\/p>\n

under the Affordable Care Act? So it’s a disjuncture and it’s exactly what<\/p>\n

these two projects point to and the way I explain this is that it’s like a paradox<\/p>\n

that Political Scientist 3 and Cantrill discovered way back in the 1960s<\/p>\n

that Americans are. If you look at public opinion, Americans are<\/p>\n

at one in the same time philosophically conservative and<\/p>\n

in utilitarian terms, they act like liberals. So if people are asked broad<\/p>\n

questions about the size of government and the extent of taxes,<\/p>\n

they will sound like conservatives. They want small government, low taxes, etc.<\/p>\n

So philosophically speaking, on these abstract principles, they sound conservative. And<\/p>\n

yet if people are asked about their support for all sorts of specific policies and whether<\/p>\n

we should have more funding for them or less, they sound like liberals. So in a utilitarian<\/p>\n

sense, they’ll say yes. Let’s have, as it turns out, expanded Medicaid<\/p>\n

under the Affordable Care Act, or let’s spend more money on Social Security or unemployment insurance<\/p>\n

or food stamps, etc. So I think that’s what we’re seeing in these election results.<\/p>\n

And it’s it’s quite fascinating. I mean, the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that<\/p>\n

Republicans had rallied against it for years, seems to be on more firm<\/p>\n

footing today because of this election. An important group of people missing, I think,<\/p>\n

from from this book are elites. And I think it kind of comes up here as part of this discussion.<\/p>\n

The puzzle you point out in this book is that you have a lot of people who receive government aid, who don’t like the federal government and<\/p>\n

don’t seem to think that they benefit from that aid. But the reverse paradox, I think it’s also interesting that you’ve<\/p>\n

a lot of people who give aid, who are more supportive or at least in the aggregate level are more supportive.<\/p>\n

So I come from New Jersey, New Jersey. Our politicians always love to talk about how we’re a donor state and we don’t get<\/p>\n

enough back from the federal government. But people in my district two weeks ago overwhelmingly supported<\/p>\n

candidates who would increase the social spending to places like Kentucky and Mississippi in places that aren’t New Jersey.<\/p>\n

Does the weird cleavage of the political parties kind of get in the way of citizen<\/p>\n

attitudes toward policy? Is the problem that the people who represent the<\/p>\n

poorest areas of the country tend to be Republicans and oppose social policy in the reverse of Democrats? That created an issue<\/p>\n

here. Well, I did find the this very interesting geographic<\/p>\n

divide. So if you look, I have these maps in the book where<\/p>\n

I show the percentage of the average person’s income that comes from federal social transfers.<\/p>\n

And with the particular data I use for the maps, it does not even include these policies that I’m calling<\/p>\n

the submerged state. It’s 40 different direct social transfer policies.<\/p>\n

And what it shows, it’s very interesting. If we go back to 1969,<\/p>\n

the average American received seven percent of their of their income from the federal<\/p>\n

government. And as of 2014, it’s up to 17 percent. Then if you look at<\/p>\n

it by state, it’s grown in every state, all over the country, but the states<\/p>\n

in which it tends to be highest. Several of them are very conservative states<\/p>\n

that send not only Republicans to Congress, but Republicans who are these days<\/p>\n

associated with the Freedom Caucus really want to scale back policies. And so,<\/p>\n

yeah, there certainly is that kind of partisan divide on net.<\/p>\n

I don’t find a clear partisan relationship between those things at the<\/p>\n

state level nationwide and partisanship. Well, it’s<\/p>\n

a factor in explaining this. It did not end up being the overriding factor that explains<\/p>\n

it. I think that’s super interesting about the state breakdown. And so a question<\/p>\n

that came up while reading this book about policy prescriptions and particular like access to higher<\/p>\n

education, et cetera, really have the action has taken place at the state<\/p>\n

and local level. So with these policies that are sort of indicative of marble cake<\/p>\n

federalism, where the states and localities as well as the federal government<\/p>\n

really share a lot of the roles and responsibilities. Where do the states come in<\/p>\n

and the government citizen does connect and also in the submerged state? Well, I<\/p>\n

was focused on policies that have funding from the federal government, although<\/p>\n

these policies vary in the extent to which states have some discretion<\/p>\n

and authority themselves over eligibility, over funding, et<\/p>\n

cetera. I did not delve into that here.<\/p>\n

You know, that’s certainly an interest of mine. It was what my my first book, Dividing Citizens looks<\/p>\n

into. But I guess for that, you know, I would really point you toward the<\/p>\n

wonderful book that came out this past year by my colleague Jamila Michener, focusing on<\/p>\n

Medicaid and variation from state to state. Someone<\/p>\n

could certainly delve in further and look at those kinds of relationships, but it’s<\/p>\n

not something I did here. There’s marble cake, federalism get in the way of responsiveness as opposed<\/p>\n

to federalism where duties are clearly delineated. But when you have some of these areas like Medicaid<\/p>\n

that are kind of but are always kind of murky to people, does not really know who will get mad at her.<\/p>\n

Oh, that’s a good question. So this is really a question of accountability.<\/p>\n

So if people are receiving benefits, is the point that perhaps they don’t know which<\/p>\n

level of government the benefits flow from? You know, I’m<\/p>\n

I’m not sure about that. And it it is true that some policies.<\/p>\n

I mean, for example, Medicaid now actually has many different names in different states.<\/p>\n

And so that could cloud things somewhat. But I don’t think that really<\/p>\n

explains away the puzzle that I’m finding because, you know, if anything<\/p>\n

good policy, the people who benefit from these policies that tend to leave more authority to the states<\/p>\n

tend to be lower income people in means tested policies. And they they’re the people who<\/p>\n

are most aware that government has done something for them, whereas the policies that<\/p>\n

benefit people who are more well-off are more likely to be nationalized policies.<\/p>\n

So I don’t think that explains it. We’ve really enjoyed hearing you talk about the book, but I wanted to ask<\/p>\n

you a little bit more about your choices when it came to what data to use and most<\/p>\n

importantly, what’s on the cutting room floor. When it came to working on this project? Oh,<\/p>\n

that’s a good question, because I worked on the project for years and years. So I think there was<\/p>\n

a lot on the cutting room floor that I ended up putting aside. And<\/p>\n

there is a lot more in these data that I’ve used and I’ve made them available on my Web<\/p>\n

site so that other scholars can can do more with them. So I<\/p>\n

used three data sets here. I used a survey that I had conducted<\/p>\n

in 2008. And then I began to probe a little bit for the summered state book and did more with it here.<\/p>\n

And I wish the data was more up to date, but it’s still the only existing data that we<\/p>\n

have that asks all of these questions about people’s use of 21 different federal<\/p>\n

social policies if they’ve ever used them, all sorts of follow up questions about<\/p>\n

their experiences and then all of these attitudinal questions that you<\/p>\n

know and participatory questions that we have in the American National Election Study, which<\/p>\n

in you know, usually you have surveys that ask either one type of question or the other, but not these<\/p>\n

two combined. So there’s a lot more to be done there. And one of the things on the cutting room<\/p>\n

floor is that anytime a person said yes, that they had used a particular policy,<\/p>\n

there were several follow up questions. And I really only began to use<\/p>\n

those data to probe what people’s experiences were like. So there’s much more<\/p>\n

to be done there. There were also more attitudinal questions<\/p>\n

that I didn’t even begin to get into in this book that I think other scholars<\/p>\n

can find to be useful. The second data set is one that I put together<\/p>\n

myself over many years with the help of several graduate students working with me. And this<\/p>\n

is historical data that looks over time at how<\/p>\n

many Americans have used each of these social policies and<\/p>\n

what the value of them is in real terms by individual or household.<\/p>\n

And so all of that is available at my Web site and a lot more could be done with that.<\/p>\n

And then the third data set that I used comes from the Bureau<\/p>\n

of Economic Analysis, which is in the Commerce Department. And this is wonderful<\/p>\n

data. And that’s that allowed me to look to create the maps where I’m looking at the state<\/p>\n

level and average usage. And actually, I drill down to the county level using those data.<\/p>\n

And so I used those only in, you know, a few ways. There’s a lot more that<\/p>\n

I think political scientists should do with those data. That’s we’re gonna start wrapping up here. We like to ask here’s<\/p>\n

where we’re going to begin asking all of our guests. You’re the first person. I get this question for our recommendation<\/p>\n

in a recent work of political science that you read that you think more people should read. Oh, wow,<\/p>\n

what a great question. So let’s see.<\/p>\n

There are so many so many things that I would like to mention.<\/p>\n

And as soon as we end this call, I’m going to think of, you know, ten others that I wish I’d I’d recommended.<\/p>\n

But for me right now, a book that’s very important is How Democracies<\/p>\n

Die, by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Zie Blot. So<\/p>\n

here they are, comparative lists who are looking at the state of American politics<\/p>\n

today and raising really valuable questions for us. I think<\/p>\n

that for scholars of American politics, we’ve had a little harder time knowing how<\/p>\n

to come at these questions. And I think that there are great concepts that are developed by comparatives<\/p>\n

who study the rise and fall democracies around the world. So I really recommend that book<\/p>\n

is very useful for getting us thinking in that direction. Do you think that Americans should study European populism<\/p>\n

more than we do? Well, I think that that’s useful. But, you know, frankly,<\/p>\n

I’m learning a lot from colleagues who study the rise involved democracy in countries around<\/p>\n

the world, not just in Europe, but Latin America, Southeast Asia<\/p>\n

and so on. So I think we need to broaden our lens in order to to understand what we’re going through.<\/p>\n

Thank you very much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. The book is The Government Says and Disconnect. We’ll have a link to it<\/p>\n

in the description below his podcast. And we look for during the next one. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/20\/2018\/12\/The-Policy-Agenda-Logo3-e1545063000555.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-download\/11\/episode-2-the-government-citizen-disconnect-with-suzanne-mettler.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/11\/episode-2-the-government-citizen-disconnect-with-suzanne-mettler.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/podcast-player\/11\/episode-2-the-government-citizen-disconnect-with-suzanne-mettler.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/thepolicyagenda\/feed\/podcast\/the-policy-agenda","embedCode":"

Episode 2: The Government-Citizen Disconnect with Suzanne Mettler<\/a><\/blockquote>