This is the Kidra Daily Podcast for Monday, March 28th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In an election year where ideology doesn't seem to matter that much,

what does it actually mean to

elect someone who will just get things done? Jason Brennan is a professor at

Georgetown University and author of a new guide to political philosophy for

Libertarianism.org. We spoke in February.

You know there's this joke that when we have a problem the thought is something needs to be done

this is something so let's do it and for years and nearly for 60 years political scientists have been studying how voters think and we find that in general voters are not particularly ideological most of them don't have anything like a coherent political

philosophy or idea.

And in this election it seems to be even worse than normal.

It almost seems like what's going on is that people are emoting.

And there's this really popular view

in political science called the expressive theory of voting which says that

voters vote in order to express their fidelity to certain ideas or worldviews and

what seems to be going on this time is that certain people on the right who,

you know, maybe working class white people who feel that they haven't gotten the same gains

as everybody else over the last 20 years, They're attracted to Trump and they feel that this is sort of their way of showing their

frustration and then maybe upper middle class white people feel that things are just in some way

unfair and they're attracted to a person who is going to fix that.

But they're, for the most part, pretty light on explaining what their policies are, why

they're going to work.

...