How Do We Use Our Different Perspectives to Find Interesting Ways to Talk about Current Events?

We are all at least part Americanist, so we usually begin with current events in American politics. We do not have a daily podcast (our frequency varies between weekly and monthly), so we tend to step back from the news cycle while still having a conversation that people find relevant for understanding the current moment.

We also have different specialties: Tim is a political theorist, Cory is a racial and ethnic politics scholar, and Casey studies elections and the presidency. This helps us to have discussions that hit historical and cultural points that three people in the same subfield might not be able to have. (Plato comes up so often that we have a running gag about him.) We did a four-part series on immigration politics in 2018 that was a great example of conversations across subdisciplines.

Why Do We Want to Talk to an Audience in This Format?

Our primary reason for podcasting is that it allows us to extend the reach of our teaching. We are all active scholars, but teaching is our vocation, and we feel like podcasting is another outlet for sharing what we know with the public. As political scientists, we are frequently frustrated by the “shiny objects” and points of emphasis that capture the attention of the media and, as a result, the public. This reality challenged us to think about how we could offer the public an alternative resource in a way that is accessible and informative. Like other political scientists who are blogging and writing op-eds, we seek to fill the void that the current media leaves open in terms of providing context for the maelstrom of current events.

We have continued the podcast into our third year for two additional reasons. First, it is fun for us. The fact that we enjoy our conversations makes them more fun to listen to and a worthwhile way for us to challenge and refine our individual perspectives on political events and trends.

Second, whereas there is no immediate professional benefit to podcasting, there also is no penalty. Our department and our university value public service as part of the tenure and promotion process. If we received signals that the time we spend on the podcast would be held against us, we probably would not continue. That said, we do have to balance podcasting against other demands on our time, which creates variability in how often we post new episodes.

How Do We Think about and Try to Reach Our Audience?

Our audience is different from podcasts aimed at true specialists (e.g., New Books in Political Science), journalists, and policy makers. We want to speak to regular folks, much like we do in our classes.

We know that we have fans among our current and former students, but we also know that our listenership extends far beyond this group. Our feedback comes in the form of occasional emails about specific episodes. Based on the questions and comments we receive, we imagine our audience to be people who follow politics closely, who perhaps once took classes in political science and miss it. We try to engage with current events at that informed, general-interest level.

None of us are experts in reaching a mass-market audience. We have not systematically analyzed the demographic, ideological, or partisan profile of our audience, other than reviewing the number of downloads. (We are happy knowing that, in total, our podcast episodes have been downloaded tens of thousands of times.) To reach beyond our personal and student networks, we rely on our social media circles and our university’s public relations department. They have helped us get spotlights on our local public radio station and in our university’s magazine. We saw a small but measurable uptick in downloads after the public radio spotlight in particular, and we received emails after the magazine spotlight.

What Are Our Hopes for the Podcast?

Obviously, we would love to be an inspiration for the US political media and have political science replace punditry, but no one is holding their breath for that. In the absence of a complete transformation of the political media, we like to think that our podcast can make accessible some political science insights to audiences that are not sitting in our classrooms and reading journals like this one. Ideally, the podcast provides not only specific information and insights to our listeners but also serves as an exemplary model of the types of conversations that are possible when people decide to look at politics through a political science lens.