politics

Democratic government depends on active, well-informed citizens. But why and how do citizens become more engaged with community and political life? This question has long interested social scientists—and the traditional research approach has been to look at how various individual characteristics either encourage or discourage participation in politics. Researchers have established, for instance, that people are more likely to vote if they have higher incomes, more years of education, and strong partisan preferences.

Another approach goes beyond individual traits to probe the role of social ties and contexts in shaping civic participation. Using innovative methods, I advance this agenda by asking whether civic engagement is increased by everyday discussions among friends, family members, and other acquaintances. Simply stated, the answer is yes. When people are exposed to discussions of politics in their immediate daily environment, they are likely to become more active civically. Talking about politics encourages people to become more active citizens. more...

Note: The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act was passed by the Senate on June 27 and has moved on to the House.

Pundits are saying the U.S. Congress is about to enact comprehensive immigration reform – that is, legislation combining enhanced enforcement with a path to citizenship for about eleven million undocumented migrants currently living in the United States. Momentum has built since the November 2012 elections put the voting clout of America’s diverse and growing minority groups on full display, and a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” Senators has put forward a bill primed for full Congressional debate. But comprehensive legislation has repeatedly failed before. Will it be different this time?

Although there are no crystal balls, recent history provides sufficient information to make informed predictions. I use some 16,000 earlier Congressional votes on immigration issues to estimate the number of “yes” and “no” votes likely to be cast this time by 535 members of Congress. My analysis suggests that even though a filibuster-proof margin of over 60 votes is well within reach in the Senate, the road to comprehensive reform legislation is much more difficult in the House – and will depend on some legislators changing course. more...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a milestone in the long fight to ensure all Americans access to the ballot box. For nearly two centuries before President Lyndon Johnson signed this legislation, most African Americans were disenfranchised by law, force, or trickery. Starting in 1965, the U.S. Justice Department gained special authority to enforce minority voting rights, including the use of a Section 5 provision to review, in advance, any changes in election rules in states or districts with a proven history of discrimination. Where poll taxes, literacy tests and sheer terror once kept them from the polls, African Americans gained unprecedented citizen clout. Black interests and candidates gained new representation, and decades later high African American turnout helped elect and re-elect Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. more...


In 2008, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin grabbed the national spotlight when Republican presidential candidate John McCain nominated her to be his running mate. Although reporters were mistaken in their speculation that Palin was chosen to woo female voters from the Democratic Party, McCain’s choice of a woman for the GOP ticket both underlined and heightened the profile of conservative women in U.S. politics.

Conservative women activists are not a new phenomenon. As central actors in social movements on the right, they have been politically active for as long as feminists and their supporters have pushed goals such as women’s suffrage, equal pay, the Equal Rights Amendment, and legalized abortion. A full understanding of women in U.S. politics is simply not possible without recognizing the many ways in which conservative women have shifted, reshaped, and pushed the boundaries of political engagement and policy debates. more...

Bell, California, is a working-class community of about 35,000 residents – and a textbook case for why U.S. democracy needs serious journalism to hold public officials accountable. For years, Bell’s city councilors awarded themselves exorbitant pay increases without transparency. They claimed stipends for serving on boards and commissions that seldom met. The city administrator took a salary of nearly $800,000, with benefits that brought his annual compensation to $1.5 million; and the police chief enjoyed an annual salary of $457,000 plus benefits, more than twice what the New York City Police Commissioner earned. Glaring corruption continued unimpeded – until 2010 when the Los Angeles Times blew the whistle in a well-researched expose. more...

As Congress considers comprehensive immigration reform, one key issue centers on whether to offer more visas and legal residency to highly skilled foreigners in science, technology, engineering and math fields. High tech employers argue that lawmakers should expand such visas. But organizations representing American workers claim there are plenty of natives who can fill tech jobs, if only U.S. employers would offer better wages and benefits, rather than running to Congress to admit foreigners who work for less in hope of gaining legal residency. I lay out both sides of this vital argument and suggest what balanced reforms might look like.  more...

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” said incoming President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he pledged in March 1933 to lead the U.S. federal government in “action—and action now” to meet crises of global upheaval and economic collapse. Subsequent New Deal reforms have been lionized by analysts. But what were the pervasive fears to which Roosevelt pointed, the fears that shaped and informed transformations in U.S. policy and politics in the mid-twentieth century?

Just before his death in 2007, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted that his magisterial Age of Roosevelt had been “conditioned by the passions of my era” and observed that “when new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian’s spotlight shifts, probing …into the shadows, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly excised from collective memory.” Taking this insight to heart, my new book Fear Itself reexamines the New Deal from a perspective informed by the urgencies of the early twenty-first century—with its economic volatility, global religious zealotry, and military insecurity.  more...

Do Americans care that income gaps between the rich and everyone else are growing by leaps and bounds? When citizens do care, what do they want done about it? Across the political spectrum, debates about these questions have raged with new force since the Occupy Wall Street movement took to the streets in 2011 and the 2012 elections highlighted the issue. To read daily coverage, though, is to hear little more than superficial or partisan assertions. We can do better by tracking public attitudes over many years, which show us both that Americans care about inequality and are very much aware of its negative consequences for all but a sliver at the top. more...

Photo by Steve Rhodes via flickr.com
Photo by Steve Rhodes via flickr.com

Over the last forty years, abortion has frequently taken center stage in American politics—as it did once again in 2012. This may seem only natural for an issue that speaks to deep values and the role of women in society. But abortion is at the margin of politics in most other rich countries, including our closest sister nations, Britain and Canada.

Why is U.S. politics different? Journalists and pundits point to the strong role of religion in American life. But Canada also has many Catholics and evangelical Protestants, and both Canada and Britain have strong antiabortion movements. In all three democracies, public opinion favors the right to an abortion in cases of rape or fetal abnormality or to protect a woman’s health, and is much less supportive when family size, poverty, or marital status are at issue.

Beyond religiosity and public opinion, national institutions play a crucial role. Abortion has become so politically explosive in the United States in significant part because we have an independently powerful Supreme Court, strong private medical professionals, weak political party elites, and a decentralized political system where controversies can live on and issues can be raised again and again. more...

The Tea Party soared to national prominence in 2009 and remains a force to be reckoned with. In November 2012, some 45 million registered voters, a fifth of the U.S. electorate, reported in a Fox News exit poll that they identified with the Tea Party. To build political power through the GOP, in the 2010 midterm elections Tea Party factions helped right-wing Republicans win super-majorities in many states, secure gains in the U.S. Senate, and take control of the House of Representatives. Democrats may have rebounded in 2012, yet more than nine of ten Tea Party-backed Republican House candidates also won election or re-election.

Why is the Tea Party enjoying so much success? Partisans and some commentators point to its stated support for fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, and reduced regulation. But support for such long-standing conservative preferences is not all we see in Tea Party politics. Many Tea Party goals – and the angry style of politics – are anything but “conservative” in the sense of favoring social stability. Tea Partiers make flamboyantly extreme claims about President Obama – for example, that he wants to confiscate guns from Americans in order to facilitate massacres of whites. And they have urged Republicans to refuse to raise the debt limit and default on America’s debts, even if that would forfeit our nation’s good credit rating and push the world economy into financial crisis.

Getting at the true wellsprings of the Tea Party requires that we look again at what the late historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style in American politics,” a recurrent tendency characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” In a survey I directed between January and March 2011, questions were put to 1,504 adults across the country. The results show that the paranoid beliefs and political style Hofstadter described have recurred in the Tea Party upsurge of the early 21st century. more...