Is Political Talk Getting Smarter?
“IQs have gone up 30 points over the last century,” says Gorton, assistant professor of political science. “If people are becoming more intelligent, according to intelligence researcher James Flynn, it’s because they’re able to understand scientific abstractions better than they used to.” There’s evidence of this in popular culture and other areas, including congressional debates. TV shows, for example, have become more complex. Janie Diels “We wondered if we would see the same thing in presidential debates and, more broadly, political discourse,” says Gorton. “What we found is the opposite.” Diels, assistant professor of communication, applied her skills as a content analyst to Flynn’s questions as she and Gorton analyzed presidential debates over the last 60 years. “Since the debates invited discussion on a wide range of topics, we thought that would be a good test to see how discussion of these topics has changed over this period of time,” says Gorton. Since 1992, Diels says there h
