#423 Andrew Delton: Evolution, Politics, the Welfare State, Partisanship, and Voting Behavior
RECORDED ON NOVEMBER 18th 2020.
Dr. Andrew Delton is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Behavioral Political Economy at Stony Brook University. His research is at the intersection of political science, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. Topics include collective action and public goods, generosity and redistribution, voting and political mobilization, partisanship, risk and time preferences, and emotions such as anger, compassion, and shame. Methods include behavioral economic games, population-based surveys, decision making tasks, implicit social cognition measures, game theoretic analysis, agent-based simulations, and cross-cultural data collection.
In this episode, we talk about political science through an evolutionary lens. We go through topics like welfare tradeoffs from an evolutionary perspective; the welfare state, and when people are for and against it; the emotion of compassion, and the role it plays in politics; free riding on public goods, and how people deal with free riders; partisanship, and voting behavior; and economic redistribution. Toward the end, we talk about the insights evolutionary psychology brings to political science.
Time Links:
Welfare tradeoffs, compassion, and support for the welfare state
Free riders, and how people deal with them; and moralization
The relationship between evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics
Coalitional psychology, partisanship, and voting behavior
Economic redistribution
Evolutionary psychology and political science
Follow Delton’s work!
Follow Dr. Delton’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/3fdr2QL
Website: https://bit.ly/2IEn4VC
ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/36OmM6w