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Category: Politics

All posts related to politics.

Trojan Horse or distraction?

At the Election Law Blog, Rick Pildes describes two rationales for adopting proportional representation (PR) nationally. One of these is anti-gerrymandering. He describes the other as the effort to induce a system of 5-6 political parties. On both, he writes:

There’s another issue to flag about the relationship between these two versions of PR in the rhetoric around reform. I’m concerned that advocates for the second version of PR will draw on the intuitions behind the first version of PR to gain support for the second version. In other words, support for the first version of PR will become a Trojan Horse for the second version.

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Descriptive racial representation and anti-gerrymandering at once

This post follows up on my earlier advice to consider minority-party representation (MPR) as an anti-gerrymandering measure. Its basics are described here and reproduced at the bottom of the post.

This week’s news has been about the potential for new Republican district maps to reduce the number of Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives. MPR can be designed to address that problem too.

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Teaching comparative electoral systems with a U.S. example

Would you like a more engaging way to teach students about electoral systems? The answer might be “yes” if you’ve been doing it with lecture slides. Compensation seats? Here’s a table of results from New Zealand. D’Hondt versus Sainte-Laguë divisors? Here’s the Belgian Parliament with either.

What if the lesson used an example students cared about? What if it were interactive?

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More ‘pure’ independents than we thought?

I have a new paper (open access) with Josh Dyck in Public Opinion Quarterly:

How should we measure “pure” or “true” independents? For years, the respective item required a respondent to volunteer that answer. Recent surveys have moved toward presenting it explicitly. Those that do produce estimates of pure independents that are much larger than in past surveys. We present evidence of this phenomenon across multiple surveys and ask: Are self-administered surveys overcounting independents, or are traditional live-interviewer surveys undercounting independents? We answer that question by comparing live-interview and self-administered samples from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, by undertaking tests to rule out mode effects (including an experiment), and by seeing which question wording correlates more strongly with measures of latent ideology, vote choice, and ratings of the parties. Our findings suggest that surveys that include an explicit response option, allowing Americans to self-identify easily as “(pure) independent,” offer a more precise measurement of the concept of party identification. This has implications for the study of independents, as well as for discussions about polarization and party-system dealignment.