Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Our Political Parties Have Polarized, But They Have a Lot Further to Go

us-reps

Last week, I wrote up a post describing how the parties in Congress have polarized in part because they represent more ideologically distinct districts and states than they used to. I produced a chart showing how the states themselves are polarizing; to the extent senators are simply representing their states today, that would lead to much more partisan behavior than it would have a few decades ago. Here's the same sort of chart showing the presidential vote by congressional district. It's a similar story. The red columns show the number of congressional districts in the 1968 presidential ... Read More

A World Without Gatekeepers?

(PHOTO: BROCREATIVE/SHUTTERSTOCK)

http://youtu.be/5MSmoWKFz5A Last year, comedian Patton Oswalt delivered the keynote address at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival. The speech (like much of Oswalt's work) is both funny and profound, particularly the section he addresses to the people he refers to as comedy's "gatekeepers"—the entertainment industry executives, focus groups, talent agents, and others who determine who gets bookings, shows, and albums, and who doesn't. As Oswalt explains it, the gatekeepers are increasingly irrelevant. Any actor with an iPhone, he notes, now has as much film-making power as ... Read More

How Much Does Ideology Matter in Elections?

(PHOTO: LABELMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Just how much does ideology matter in an election? In a recent article in Commentary, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that it matters a lot, to the point where it cost Mitt Romney the presidency: By all rights, Barack Obama should have lost the 2012 election. The economy during his first term in office was weak from beginning to end. Growth was anemic when not utterly static, unemployment was persistently high, and, as recently as last year, an overwhelming majority of Americans still believed we were in a recession. The signature legislative achievements of the president’s first ... Read More

Pirate Party Docks at Berlin’s Parliament

The recent U.S. shutdown of the Hong Kong-based file-hosting service Megaupload has led other file sharing sites to tighten their content sharing practices, for fear of facing criminal charges. Seven of Megaupload’s executives were charged with copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering, while CEO Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish citizen, was arrested along with four others and could face up to 55 years in prison. Hackers have retaliated, leading some, like the ubiquitous “Anonymous,” to claim credit for attacking the Justice Department's website. But while pirating ... Read More

Political Fact Checking That Doesn’t Amplify the Lie

Political fact-checking operations have proliferated over the last several campaigns. The Annenberg Public Policy Center launched the original FactCheck.org. The St. Petersburg Times’ PolitiFact won a Pulitzer for famously calling out politicians’ pants when they were on fire. And The Washington Post just launched a new and permanent Fact Checker column. Collectively, they have debunked death panels, vicious lies about light bulbs and birtherism. But there’s a problem with the whole concept. “The danger of print fact checking is that we have to describe what it is that’s ... Read More

Third Parties: The Avant-Garde of Change

Throughout American history, many big changes in public policy — or in the country, for that matter — have been presaged by agitation from little-celebrated actors in the political process: third parties. "If you look at the range of issues that third parties were out in front of before the Democrats and the Republicans would touch them with a 10-foot pole," said political scientist David Gillespie, "I could take you down through page after page, including some very important ones." The Liberty and Free Soil parties wanted abolition before the mainstream did. The Prohibition Party ... Read More

America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think

Among the many memes floating around in the wake of the 2010 election is that America has taken a rightward turn, and conservative pundits seem re-energized in calling America a center-right nation. After all, a plurality of American voters (42 percent) now call themselves “conservative” — as compared to just 35 percent who say they are “moderate” and 20 percent who say they are “liberal.” Two years ago, moderates and conservatives both were at 37 percent. But new research suggests that pundits ought to be cautious of overinterpreting the conservative label: It doesn’t ... Read More

Dismissing Gridlock: A Case for Parliamentary Systems

This story originally posted on April 20, 2009. Perhaps you've heard these complaints before: There's too much gridlock in Washington; our leaders are incapable of solving big problems; politics is broken. So, we blame our politicians. Over the last 35 years, the approval rating for Congress has averaged a dismal 35 percent. (Lately, it hit 31 percent, a two-year high.) But maybe it's not our elected leaders that we should be chiding. John Gerring and Strom C. Thacker, professors of political science at Boston University, say the actual problem may be our political institutions, ... Read More

‘Independent’ Voters Are Generally Not

Politico.com had disheartening news for Democrats on July 9. "Independents edge away from Obama," declared the Web site's top story, which noted a Virginia poll in which independent voters in the state disapproved of the president's job performance by 52 to 38 percent. The piece called this "a potentially alarming trend for the White House," a statement which reflects the importance political journalists place on the views of independents. Their shifts in opinion are carefully monitored in the media and often treated as a bellwether, signaling which way the electorate is leaning. The ... Read More