Politics Moves Fast. Peer Review Moves Slow. What’s A Political Scientist To Do?

Take that survey on voter suppression in Wisconsin. Kenneth Mayer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was the lead researcher on a project that sent surveys to 2,400 people in two counties who hadn’t voted in the 2016 election, then published the results as a press release. Twelve percent of people replied to the survey, and by extrapolating those 288 responses to all people in those counties who were registered to vote but did not, Mayer’s team estimated that between 11,000 and 23,000 Wisconsinites could have been deterred from voting because of the state’s ID law.