Linus Westheuser
LightNews LightNews
banner
lwestheuser.bsky.social
Linus Westheuser
@lwestheuser.bsky.social
7.2K followers 4K following 380 posts
Political sociologist at Humboldt University Berlin・Class, morality, cleavage politics・🔗 linuswestheuser.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Linus Westheuser
sophieehill.bsky.social
Antitrust policy is highly technocratic and has a specialized cadre of regulators/lawyers/economists to enforce it.

But ideological capture may be a useful concept for scholars focused on other domains, too.
Conclusion Scholars often invoke the term "ideological capture" but seldom define it or its relationship to the broader concept of regulatory capture (see, e.g., Chuang 2010). In this article, we provide a definition and specify a set of tools that scholars can use to identify whether, and to what extent, a regulatory framework evidences ideological cap-ture, and whether that capture is normatively troubling. We validate our claims with a novel empirical study of American public opinion about antitrust enforcement policy. The results suggest that the main framework for evaluating anticompetitive conduct, the CWS, marginalizes important public concerns. Together with prior work showing that the standard did not arise from conventional processes for legal reform but from judicial and bureaucratic activism and a new analysis of public opinion about antitrust policy from the 1980s and 1990s, the evidence suggests that contemporary antitrust policy evidences a strong form of ideological capture. Experts play an essential role in designing the regulatory frameworks that guide bureaucratic decision making. But with this privilege comes the potential for abuse. This potential emerges from two characteristics of American political institutions. First, it emerges from the unique role that the judiciary plays in setting regulatory standards in the US. Judges (who are also lawyers) are ideologically motivated actors who are insulated from public demands and, as the ultimate arbiter of congressional intent, they have the power to unilaterally specify legislative objectives and regulatory frameworks. Second, experts play an essential role in designing the frameworks that guide regulatory decision making, and these ideological perspectives often make strong assumptions about what is, or is not, in the "public interest." Experts can and do use this privilege to develop frameworks that emphasize some concerns while minimizing others. Ideological capture emanates, in our view, from these two sources of structural power. Though we have focused on a somewhat technocratic issue to illustrate our main arguments, we suspect ideological capture is pervasive in American government. The law and economics movements (and neoliberal thought, more broadly) influenced policy in many domains from criminal sentencing to regulatory cost-benefit analysis, where regulators routinely estimate the dollar value of human life (Viscusi 2018). And there is reason to believe ideological capture exists in settings far beyond the law and economics movement. Prior work suggests, for example, that the law and economics movement arose as a counter-mobilization to a similar movement among liberal elites that leveraged the power of liberal judges, academics, and lawyers to stymie conservatives even when they won elections (Teles 2008). Teles (2008, 3) claims, for exam-ple, "that changes in the form of political competition over the past half-century, especially the increasing importance of ideas and professional power, have led to a decline in the power of elections to cause comprehensive change, especially in highly entrenched political domains." If that is true, then significant amounts of policy stasis may arise not from typical sources, like the complex distribution of power in American government, but from ideological retrenchment among those professionals who play an outsized role in designing and enforcing laws and regulations. Whether we observe ideological capture in other domains and whether it has increased over time are therefore important empirical questions that scholars can explore in future work. The answers may change the way we think about power and influence in the American political economy and the ability of elections to advance the public interest.
November 18, 2025 at 10:39 AM
Reposted by Linus Westheuser
dancassino.bsky.social
Second, while we've long known that gender traditionalism was related to Trump supoort, this is the first indication that the relationship is reciprocal. Greater gender traditionalism makes people like Trump more, but liking Trump, over time, makes people's gender identities more traditional.
November 14, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Linus Westheuser
cominsitu.bsky.social
The claim of the article is that a recognition theory of class can compliment a structuralist account of class, not by reducing class to subjective identity but by exploring how the structural vulnerability to economic domination is experienced first-hand as a form of injury to one's self-worth.
November 14, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Linus Westheuser
ryanlcooper.com
really key point. polls, particularly issue polls, are a WILDLY unrealistic way to measure how people actually interact with political messaging these days
RCTs, like surveys, occur “in channel.” People are recruited to respond (usually through online solicitations), made to pay attention (with financial incentives or simply due to how testing platforms are configured), and register their preferences knowing they’re being observed. Once upon a time, when Americans were captive viewers of limited network television channels, forced to sit through commercials without even a remote control for ready escape, these experiments more closely mirrored real-world conditions. Today, however, political messages reach Americans as they are scrolling or cooking or breaking up skirmishes between their kids. Indeed, they’re mostly doing their best to avoid ads altogether. In-channel testing gauges the response to a single exposure of a message and pronounces these to be the message’s effect. But messages aren’t single-use plastics. Many don’t work until they are repeated frequently. Some are more rebuttable than others. Some could work if spoken by messengers other than those in the materials tested. Vote choice tends to be the gold standard in electoral RCTs. Treatments that produce higher numbers of respondents saying they’d vote for the Democratic candidate are considered to have bested the game. While this may seem like the obvious metric — the task come election day is to net more votes — this simplifies how one reaches that goal. You cannot mistake winning a trial heat for winning an election. Often, what you need to measure is what would make the story that favors your side seem credible, what punctures the key strength of your opponent, or what — only upon unrelenting repetition — reframes the electoral stakes to your advantage. Tellingly, when consumer juggernauts use RCTs, their most critical metric is often belief in key attributes such as trust in the brand rather than would you buy this product.
November 13, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Linus Westheuser
casmudde.bsky.social
The Democrats take young women for granted, but this graph should give them pause. Young women no longer trust national institutions (why should they, as these institutions do not protect their rights). This distrust can easily extend to the Democratic Party in the future (for the same reasons).
November 13, 2025 at 3:27 PM