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This Element develops an analytical framework for understanding the role of ideas in political life and communication. Power in Ideas argues that the empirical study of ideas should combine interpretive approaches to derive meaning and understand influence with quantitative analysis to help determine the reach, spread, and impact of ideas. This Element illustrates this approach through three case studies: the idea of reparations in Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," the idea of free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook policy speech at Georgetown University, and the idea of universal basic income in Andrew Yang's "Freedom Dividend." Power in Ideas traces the landscapes and spheres within which these ideas emerged and were articulated, the ways they were encoded in discourse, the fields they traveled across, and how they became powerful.

This article offers the first systematic study of the hiring patterns and career experiences of women working on U.S. presidential campaigns in the new field of political technology. We paired the quantitative analysis of a dataset of 995 staffers active in technology, digital media, data, and analytics across four presidential election cycles (2004–2016) with data from 45 in-depth interviews with women active on 12 presidential campaigns. We find that women are systematically under-represented, they do not ascend to leadership positions at the same rates as men, and they do not have the same entrepreneurial opportunities. When women do get hired, many find it challenging to be heard, are judged according to different standards than men, and have few ways of holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior or arbitrary exercises of power. The findings likely have implications for other fields that have been reshaped by technology, from journalism to entertainment media.

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded "troll farm" known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology in the United States. Drawing on a unique dataset of 1004 political tech staffers and interviews with 45 women who worked on presidential campaigns between 2004-2016, this book reveals the underrepresentation of women in political technology, especially leadership positions, as well as the struggle women face to have their voices heard within the boys' clubs and bro cultures of the field. The book aims to help political practitioners create more gender equitable and inclusive workplaces, ones that value the ideas and skills of all those who work to get candidates elected.