Midterm elections are next year, and historically, they often result in the president's party losing some seats in Congress.

Republican lawmakers in Texas want to change the boundaries around voting districts in hopes of protecting the GOP House majority,

and Democratic lawmakers in some blue states are now talking through plans to take similar retaliatory action to benefit their party.

All this raises an interesting question.

Who is more likely to support fair political competition, citizens or the politicians they elect?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.

Populists worry elites in charge will overlook what matters to the majority.

Elitists worry, many members of the public, don't understand the issues they're voting on.

And pretty much everybody assumes their

ideological or partisan adversaries would be willing to subvert democratic principles to give their

side an advantage. But you know what they say about assumptions? My guest is a political scientist

who devised some clever studies to test how much daylight can be found between the principles

of populists and idealists.

Curtis Bram is a political scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of the book

Elidism versus Populism, Experiments on the Dual Threat to American Democracy.

Curtis, welcome to think.

Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me.

All right, first things first, what do we need to know about the difference between elitists and populists, elitism and populism?

You know, I wrote this book because I kept seeing all of these headlines, which were saying,

like, hey, you know, some politician is attacking our institutions, is not committed to democracy.

And I felt like a lot of those

headlines looked like partisan spin. And so I wanted to get some data to figure out what's real.

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