Over 20 years ago, I was fortunate to write an article with Richard Merelman, a renowned political scientist at UW-Madison who wrote extensively on culture and politics. I was in graduate school in Madison at the time and interested in Professor Merelman’s work on race and democracy, and we had a discussion one day about […]
Tag Archives: Politics
For many years I assigned Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone in my Political Behavior class, and we had great discussions about the health of American civic life. In more recent years (I don’t assign the book anymore), I asked students to update some of the graphs in the book to see how the trends identified by […]
In November 2025, Maine voters weighed in on two ballot measures: Q1 asked about restrictions to voting, including changes in access to absentee ballots; Q2 asked about a red flag law for gun access. Q1 failed, with 64 percent of voters opposing it. Q2 passed with 63 percent of the vote. In the partisan world […]
I’m posting some additional results from the campus poll I fielded with my students. For one, much has been made recently about the possible impact of Bowdoin’s curriculum on students’ political views. The newly elected Mayor of New York is a Bowdoin grad, and because he holds very liberal positions on many issues, some have […]
In many ways the decisive outcome of the presidential election on November 5 was surprising. Many expected the election to be closer and for the count in battleground states to take multiple days. On the other hand, the outcome makes sense given voters’ expressed frustration with the economy in general and inflation in particular. Plus, […]
As part of a research project with a Bowdoin student, we are collecting pre-election House and Senate ratings from a variety of sources. I recently grabbed the 2024 ratings from Wikipedia, though they include links to the underlying sources where we can verify the data. In 2024, we found ten different sources for election ratings, […]
On March 6th, I was part of a great roundtable at Colby College on the 2012 election. You can check out the audio from the event here.
Michael Franz 