Category: UW Experts in the News

Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor whose work includes looking at AI and political communication, noted the new technology comes at the same time there’s been a rise in disinformation delivered by foreign adversaries to disrupt the U.S. electoral system.

“Ranked choice voting doesn’t have an obvious partisan advantage in places where it’s been implemented. It hasn’t helped the Democrats or the Republicans in any consistent fashion,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But it’s become sort of a folk wisdom in Republican circles that ranked choice voting is a plan by Democrats to help them do better in elections and to hurt Republicans. I don’t know where that has come from exactly.”

Howard Schweber, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, said the lawsuit is essentially moot because he believes the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately have the final say.

“There’s no question that this issue is going to go to the United States Supreme Court, so all of this is kind of performative,” Schweber said.

To Howard Schweber, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in constitutional law, there are two separate issues at play: the legal and the political.

“There have been no reported appellate court cases in Wisconsin dealing with the issue of how housing is addressed in local comprehensive plans,” said Brian Ohm, a retired professor in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at UW-Madison, calling the lack of legal challenges “a surprise to a lot of people.”

“Forgiveness is a moral virtue basically; it is a merciful response toward those who have not been good to us — without excusing the people, without forgetting, lest it happen again, without necessarily reconciling,” said Robert Enright, a pioneer in the field of forgiveness science and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“It’s important who wins the White House for a whole host of reasons,” said Michael Wagner, the director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, who has published research on how abortion became a partisan issue in the news. “But for those who have become pregnant and don’t want to be, the election does not come in time to provide them a remedy.”

In order to get the U.S. Supreme Court to look at the case, the Legislature and its allies will need to make the argument that there was a violation of federal law. That’s because, explained Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin Law School professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, the core legal claim in the case — contiguity — is a matter of state law.

The case brought to the court argued the maps violate Wisconsin’s Constitution because some legislative districts include pieces of land that are not connected. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court has the last word on state law questions,” Yablon said.

Washing meat likely originated in cultures around the world as a way to get rid of the inedible material left on freshly slaughtered meat, says Kathleen Glass, associate director of the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before industrialized food processing (and today in communities that still butcher their own meat), washing was an important line of defense against dirt, animal debris, and perhaps also the host of pathogens that live in raw meat.

Over the last few decades, Wisconsin and the U.S. have seen divorces lead to a growing rate of equal joint custody of children, instead of one parent gaining sole custody. We talk to Quentin Riser, an assistant professor of human development & family studies at UW-Madison, about how this shift has affected families and the child support system.

Susan Ridgely is a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said Francis has wanted to portray the church as welcoming since early in his papacy. She pointed to his symbols of service, such as washing the feet of young inmates.

The declaration is a “natural extension” of Francis’s olive branches to a changing world, she said. “That’s a major step towards kind of an openness of the church and an acknowledgment that people reaching out for God should get that blessing through the church,” she said.

“This should have more bipartisan support, because it is something that should, at least theoretically, help improve the voting process and be a better reflection of what voters’ true intentions are,” said David Canon, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Adam Stevenson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin  Law School and an expert in criminal law and sentencing, said while this type of sentence is extremely rare, many states are banning the practice, including Texas, Arkansas, Minnesota and Iowa.

This bill “generally follows with both the Supreme Court’s commentary that kids are different — they change, they mature, both emotionally, but also, scientifically,” Stevenson said. “It also follows the greater trends across the country.”