Masters in Public Affairs copertina

Masters in Public Affairs

Masters in Public Affairs

Di: Joseph Lavoie
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Each episode goes deep on one book that belongs in a modern public affairs canon—extracting the core idea, the mental models, and how it connects to real wins and failures today. Built for practitioners who never stop working the fundamentals.Joseph Lavoie Economia
Episodi
  • Polarization, by Nolan McCarty

    Polarization, by Nolan McCarty
    Oct 14 2026
    Every one of us now works in a polarized environment. It changes who we can engage, how we engage them, and how that engagement gets read by everyone watching. Nolan McCarty is a political scientist at Princeton who has spent more than 20 years measuring how far apart the two American parties have moved. This book is him taking the common explanations for polarization one at a time and checking each against decades of data. You are probably familiar with many of these explanations: Polarization is caused by redrawn electoral maps, party primaries, cable news, the internet, corporate money, and the voters themselves. It turns out, most of these are wrong. The finding the whole book rests on is that American polarization started at the top. Elected officials, activists, and donors moved apart in the mid-1970s; voters didn't change until the 1990s, and when they did, most didn't become more extreme. They sorted themselves into whichever party already agreed with them. In fact, the share of Americans giving extreme answers on the issues hasn't moved in 40 years. So what gives? That’s what we cover in this episode. What We Cover in the Episode My own story from the pandemic: someone close to me who held my views on COVID until the day places of worship stayed closed while bars reopened, and then changed sides almost overnight. It kick-started a growing obsession I have with this topic. Two votes 45 years apart. Medicare passed in 1965 with a majority of House Republicans and 14 of 32 Republican senators voting yes. Obamacare passed in 2010 with no Republican votes at all. Polarization, partisanship, and sorting: three different things that produce the same picture in a poll, and why we shouldn’t conflate them. The immigration example. The gap between Democrats and Republicans on whether immigrants strengthen the country went from 2 points in 1994 to 42 points in 2017, while the whole country moved in the same direction, from 30% to 65% agreeing. Nobody's views had to move for that gap to open. The partisan overlap: in the 1960s and 70s, some of the most liberal members of Congress were Republicans and some of the most conservative were Democrats. Today every Republican sits to the right of every Democrat. Why the same district elects a liberal or a conservative depending on who wins, and why that means redrawing the maps can't fix it. The four incentives that pull a legislature apart: individual donors now supply 80% of a candidate's money, up from 20%; moderates have stopped running; an opposition that can win the next election has no reason to cooperate; and parties too weak to protect members from a primary challenge. Four mental models: before you believe a gap, check the middle; one district, two very different representatives; weak parties, strong partisanship; and the system decides what polarization does to you. Three misunderstandings: "it's worse than ever and I can feel it," "the algorithms did it," and "the voters did it." On the algorithms, what the browsing data from 2004 to 2016 shows, and why the Americans who hardened fastest were the ones least likely to be online. The Canadian numbers, from a July 2025 survey of 2,250 Canadians by Digital Public Square and Abacus Data, and where I think polarization does its damage in a parliamentary system. The mastery lesson: on polarization, gather the data to understand the environment rather than to make a case, and the hopeful reading of what that data shows.
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    51 min
  • People, Power, Change, by Marshall Ganz

    People, Power, Change, by Marshall Ganz
    Sep 30 2026
    Power is who needs whom more. You shift it by asking the people already around you for a commitment, and asking again once they've kept it Why This Book Matters Marshall Ganz went to Mississippi in 1964 to work in the civil rights movement, spent sixteen years organizing farmworkers alongside Cesar Chavez, designed the volunteer training for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, and has taught organizing at Harvard since 1994. This book is the course he has taught for thirty years: five practices of organizing, each explained through a campaign he was inside. Most books on this show explain how something works. This one teaches how to build power when you start with none. Power, Ganz says, is a relationship rather than a possession: if you need my resources more than I need yours, I have the power. Organizing is the work of shifting that balance. When the farmworkers struck in 1965, the growers had the land, the money, and the law, and there were always more workers. What the growers couldn't replace was the customer, so the union sent farmworker families to fifty cities to ask people not to buy grapes, and five years later the growers signed. Ganz writes for a progressive American audience and never addresses a reader who works for a company, so the translation is mine. Most companies engage the people around them, their employees, suppliers, and the towns they operate in, by sending a message outward and counting who received it. Ganz's organizations are built the other way around: the people in them are asked for commitments, and get a say in return, and that is what lets them act when it counts. He calls a group like that a constituency, and I'm not sure many companies have one. What I don't know is whether a company can offer the people around it a real say, when every relationship it has is one the other person can walk away from. If you've seen a version of that work, I'd like to hear about it. What We Cover in the Episode A Monday morning in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, when Martin Luther King Jr. stood at his window and watched the first bus of the day go by empty. Within a month the bus company was asking the city to let it double its fares. The people who emptied those buses had no money the company would miss and no vote the mayor feared, and Ganz opens his book with what they had instead. After 2016, thousands of local political groups formed across the United States. Ganz reports on what became of them, and most are gone. Ganz's definition of power, and the sixteen-year fight that proved it. A twenty-two-year-old farmworker named Jessica Govea ran the grape boycott in Toronto and then Montreal, in a French she barely spoke. The one-on-one, the recruiting conversation every organizer learns first, and the afternoon in San Antonio when Ganz, twenty years into his career, watched a veteran run one and realized he'd been doing it wrong. The house meeting: twenty or thirty people in someone's living room, invited by the host rather than the organizer. Ganz asks every host to list fifty people they know, and the episode explains why fifty, and why not close friends only. The two asks every guest leaves with. The second is to go home and host their own meeting, with their own fifty, within a few days. Nancy Pelosi's first campaign for Congress in 1987: six organizers, eighty-seven house meetings, six hundred people in three weeks, and how those meetings told the campaign who its leaders were. What a working team looks like, and the structure Ganz calls a snowflake, in which teams build teams. It put fifteen thousand volunteers on the ground in South Carolina for Obama in 2008, most of them new to politics. Why Ganz gives a volunteer responsibility for an outcome rather than a task, and why an organization built this way grows with use instead of wearing out. Three mental models: Moral Resources, the Arrow and the Cycle, and Mobilizing versus Organizing. Three misreadings: that organizing is a slower kind of mobilizing, that a book about movements is a book about protest, and that leading with values brings people together. What this asks of a company, which is whether the people around it are a constituency or a mailing list, and the budget line almost no corporate affairs team has. Then the mastery lesson: the master organizer is the person who asks.
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    1 ora e 3 min
  • Politics Is for Power, by Eitan Hersh

    Politics Is for Power, by Eitan Hersh
    Sep 16 2026
    To get a decision-maker's attention when it counts, you should be securing, and organizing votes. Why This Book Matters In 2018, Eitan Hersh surveyed Americans and found that a third of them spend two hours or more a day on politics, and that four out of five of those people spend none of that time on anything that could be called political work. How do they—and how do we—spend all of time engaged in politics? You know the answer already: we gobble up news, podcasts, social media, and then spend a lot of time complaining about the state affairs. Hersh himself was guilty of this behaviour he calls political hobbyism. Politics Is for Power is the book he wrote to work out what the alternative looks like. Hersh makes the case that political power is built by serving people before you ask anything of them, in units small enough to repeat, inside an organization that exists before the fight arrives. He also explains why the local institutions that used to do this work were stripped of their reasons to do it. The book is written for citizens and parties, and the translation to corporate public affairs is not automatic. Most of what a company does for people is already a transaction, and Hersh's model of service runs on help that comes free. But the question the book puts to a citizen — how much of your political time goes to building power, and how much to consuming politics — applies to a corporate affairs function without any adjustment at all. What We Cover in the Episode The arithmetic of power. One vote out of 130 million changes nothing, but a person who can move ten neighbours is worth something a politician can count, and the book's stories are all about how that person gets made. Naakh Vysoky, a retired doctor in his seventies, who helped three hundred elderly Soviet immigrants pass the citizenship test after welfare reform threatened their income, and then turned that trust into a precinct with double the turnout of every precinct around it. Dave Fleischer, the organizer behind deep canvassing (https://www.mastersinpublicaffairs.com/episodes/how-minds-change/), and why he listens to the people who voted against his marriage. The empathy has a purpose, and the purpose is votes. A county Democratic party in the Portland suburbs that couldn't get thirteen people to a meeting, and the first thing it did when it decided to rebuild: pay one person's salary. What that person built was a program where every volunteer is responsible for thirty-five households, and why thirty-five is the number that makes it work. Angela Aldous, a nurse who watched a million recall signatures in Wisconsin turn into nobody on the doors, and who built a group in Pennsylvania on the assumption that it would lose for years. When the local congressman resigned in a scandal, her group had been organizing for ten months, and the Democrat won by 755 votes. How $9,000 raised by a college-town precinct committee unlocked $680,000 in state party money for a candidate the party had written off, and why it only worked because the committee existed before she needed it. Why almost nobody does any of this anymore: the fifty-year history of how local parties gave up the ballot, the nominations, and the patronage, and were left with a chair, a treasurer, and no reason to exist. Hersh tests it on his own town's Democratic committee, and the annual buffet is better attended than the phone bank. Three mental models: the Control Trade, the Bounded Unit, and the Hollow Party. Three ways the book gets misread, including the one I struggled with myself: that Naakh's model is just the old ward-boss machine with better manners. What this looks like when the organization is a company, and the mastery lesson: the willingness to want power at all, and a specific kind of patience
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    1 ora e 8 min
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