Later today or next week, the Court in the Arizona redistricting-commission case will issue one of its more important decisions on “the law of democracy.” To provide context for that decision, it’s useful to see two paradoxes the case illustrates… Continue reading

The Supreme Court’s decision today to decide what “one person, one vote” actually means is not all that surprising, at least to many of us.  In all the years since the Court recognized that election districts must have equal populations,… Continue reading

I’ve now posted this article, and this abstract for it, at this link.  I began this debate with this piece in the Washington Post/Monkey Cage; those responding critically to my views include the political scientist Seth Masket, here,… Continue reading

Next Wednesday, Jan. 21st, is the fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.  I’ll be participating in an intriguing conference The Center for Competitive Politics is hosting, which will kick off with an interview of the General… Continue reading

In reading Michael Ignatieff’s recent political autobiography, Fire and Ashes:  Success and Failure in Politics, about his six-year foray into electoral politics, I came across an important account of the breakdown of Canada’s system of publicly-financed elections, in ways that… Continue reading

Here is the Foundation Press announcement, with active links: 2014 Supplement to The Law of Democracy (4th ed.) Samuel Issacharoff, NYU Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford Richard H. Pildes, NYU Casebook ISBN 9781599419350 Teacher’s Manual ISBN 9781599419367 The 2014 Update Memo… Continue reading

I have been arguing (as in this Washington Post/Monkey Cage piece) that political fragmentation is a defining attribute of our political era.  Fragmentation is quite different from the partisan polarization of politics that has drawn far greater attention; polarization… Continue reading

From Ellen Barry’s article in the NY Times: For generations, Congress [the dominant political party] politicians have focused heavily on the rural electorate, in part because a 30-year freeze on redistricting kept the number of urban constituencies artificially low, said… Continue reading

The majority in McCutcheon invokes the fact that other institutions — namely, Congress and/or the FEC — have the power to fill any regulatory gaps that might emerge from the Court’s striking down the aggregate contribution limits. Some critics of… Continue reading

The Wall Street Journal’s online blog has posted initial reactions to the decision here.  Here is my contribution: The inevitable sky-is-falling reactions that will surely greet this 5-4 decision in many quarters are likely to be wrong.  First, the… Continue reading

Suggestions include a two-year budget; restoring the role of the committee process; five-day work weeks in DC; forums for bipartisan communication within Congress and between  Congress and the White House; independent districting commissions.  See this op-ed in the Boston Globe.

In a good piece, Professor Seth Masket takes issue with my argument that political power and the political parties today are highly fragmented.  Instead, he suggests we ought to see the parties more as “networked:” The modern American party… Continue reading

In my Washington Post essay I blogged about recently here, I argued that political fragmentation of the political parties is the danger to focus on if we are worried about the capacity of our political institutions to govern effectively. … Continue reading

As the final piece in its terrific series on political polarization, the Washington Post/Monkey Cage has published an essay of mine, which can be found here. My launching off point is the view that the extreme polarization of the political… Continue reading