Recent political movements within the United States have raised concerns about the health of American democracy. With hyper-partisanship dividing the country and Donald Trump—the most unlikely, unsuitable, and unpopular presidential nominee of a major party in American history—securing the Republican nomination, the question emerges of whether democracy in America has gone awry.  And if so, is it too much or too little democracy that’s to blame?

To help address those questions, in this paper, Thomas E. Mann summarizes and discusses the findings of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ ambitious treatise on American democracy: “Democracy for Realists.” Achen and Bartels contend that the traditional conception of voters as rational, attentive decision-makers does not hold against empirical evidence. Instead, voters are best understood as members of partisan groups, which influence their perception of candidates, issues, and even simple facts. According to Achen and Bartels, perceived social identities drive voting decisions, rather than rationality.

Mann notes that most scholars would agree that voters do not follow the expectations of idealistic models, but draws attention to competing theories that are far less damning to voters’ rationality. In particular, the research of Paul Sniderman and Arthur Lupia suggests that voters are far more capable than Achen and Bartels would assert. In their view, voters have enough rationality and information to ensure a well-functioning democracy.

As Mann summarizes the arguments:  Achen and Bartels believe that citizens and elections are held to impossible, idealistic standards in the folk theory of democracy, which perpetuates myths and works against government responsiveness. Sniderman and Lupia, on the other hand, are offended by those who dismiss citizens as ignorant and incompetent; they seek to defend voters’ dignity and demonstrate the rationality and efficacy of their behavior in American democracy.

What does this scholarship tell us about the coming presidential election, and the future of American democracy?  Ultimately, Mann concludes that Achen and Bartel’s perspective is not anti-democratic, even if it is built on a belief that too much importance is placed on the often random and myopic outcomes of elections.  Instead, Mann believes that “Democracy for Realists” reveals the real democratic deficit facing America is one stemming not from too much democracy, but  from “asymmetry in political resources and representation of different segments of American society.” Truly understanding this problem and its root cause is a step toward strengthening American democracy. 

Downloads

• Download the paper

      

 

 

The coverage of the presidential general election campaign has effectively begun and I am already disheartened if not surprised. Objectively covering a presidential race that includes Donald Trump seems well nigh impossible.

For reasons of accuracy, fairness and fears of political bias, major media organizations are strongly committed to telling “both sides of the story” in as balanced a way as possible. If the sides of the story are not comparable in their plausibility or truthfulness, the trick is to find a way to balance them. One favorite is to focus on campaign strategies and tactics and speculate on their likely success or failure. Another is to impute a false equivalence between the two sides and treat them in a balanced fashion. Yet another is to let the two sides or, in this case, candidates, speak for themselves—let the videos roll—and not impose any value judgments on what they have said. (That’s for the etiquette denizens of the style section or fact checkers on social media.)

The vast output of mind-numbing, poll-driven stories and crosstalk about the inside baseball of campaigns in recent weeks reveals that this is once again the preferred method of journalists for maintaining neutrality and achieving balance in the media.

But running a close second is the old favorite of false equivalence. The polls reveal that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unpopular and untrustworthy (for very different reasons, but that is beside the point). It’s perfect. One can already see the equivalence taking hold in the country’s most respected news organizations. Trump might be the most unqualified and temperamentally unsuited major party presidential nominee in American history, conceivably a threat to the stability of our democracy, but “voters just don’t trust Hillary.” (Conclusion: they are both untrustworthy; the sources and consequences of the public distrust for each candidate are best treated symmetrically.) Neither Trump, with his hard-edge nationalism, nor Clinton, with “a swirl of scandal surrounding her candidacy,” fit an electorate increasingly disenchanted with the political class. (Conclusion: two evils, equally balanced.)

The third tack of the press for telling both sides of the story, letting the candidates speak for themselves, is always in reserve. We know from the primary season that Trump is especially adept at attracting live coverage of whatever is on his mind. His storytelling always attracts the most views and clicks. Good for business. And he is always available to the press while Clinton restricts access and avoids full blown press conferences. And everyone thinks her speeches are so boring. This advantage for Trump can backfire, as we saw in the live coverage of his press conference defending his personal generosity to veterans. But I doubt he considers that a failure.

It has taken only a few weeks for a Trump candidacy widely viewed as lunatic and dangerous to become normalized in the mainstream press, handled no differently than Clinton and her private email server. There’s still plenty of honest, revealing journalism on the opinion pages, explanatory journalism outlets, and blogs. Michael Gerson, Robert Kagan, Adam Gopnik and Jonathan Weisman are exemplars.

The problem is the banality, false equivalence, and amorality of the daily coverage of the campaign.

It’s possible that the news coverage won’t make a bit of difference. Trump could well drown in his own fantastical and hateful words. But the fundamentals of the election point to a close election, and the relative (un)attractiveness of the two candidates could be dispositive. From the viewpoint of the well-being of our democracy, I don’t think it is even close. But that is not a topic likely to lead the news coverage of this election. A pity, for the press and for the country. Now back to Hillary’s private email server.

      

 

 

Where do we go from here? To a large swath of Americans and most of the rest of the world, American politics have careened out of control, lurching from a role model of sensible policy making and civil discourse to gridlock over even modest proposals with bipartisan buy-in, and to a presidential campaign with the kind of angry populist bluster, coarse language and sectarian division formerly associated with Peron-style banana republics.

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office. Both House and Senate have declined to recognize the budget the president submitted in January, refusing even to hold the customary hearings with the head of the National Economic Council and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And within an hour of the announcement of the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that the Senate would not recognize any nominee put forward by Obama—no vetting, no hearing, not even the customary individual meetings with Judiciary Committee Republicans.

Continue reading the entirety of this piece on TheAtlantic.com. 

      

 

 

This piece originally appeared in The Washington Post. 

“The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” That passage, which framed a core part of the argument of our 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, was vilified by conservative commentators, called a rant and a parody.

Fast forward to 2016. Incredibly, Republican destructiveness is even worse than it was four years ago—and the party is paying for it with a surge of anti-establishment populism that is tearing apart its coalitional base.

Parts of our 2012 diagnosis were widely recognized and supported by scholarly research. As our political parties became more ideologically distinct and competitively balanced in their electoral struggle to control the White House and Congress, they took on the characteristics of their parliamentary counterparts: internally unified and fiercely oppositional. But parliamentary-like parties in a presidential or separation-of-powers system—one prone to divided government and clashing mandates—are a formula for willful obstruction and policy irresolution.

The American constitutional system has been vulnerable to this mismatch since its beginning. Polarized parties are bound to strain the constitutional system, as they did in the years leading up to the Civil War and at the end of the 19th Century during the Gilded Age. This era differs, however, because the parties have tribalized in a distinctly asymmetric way.

It is the radicalization of the Republican party—not just in terms of ideology but also in an utter rejection of the norms and civic culture underlying our constitutional system—that has been the most significant and consequential change in American politics in recent decades. Tribal politics fueled by partisan and social media leaves us with a good vs. evil view of democracy and a visceral hatred of the opposition party.

There is another factor that is less ideological and more strategic: the phenomenon of the permanent campaign in a competitive environment. Republicans in Congress—from the day of President Obama’s inauguration in 2009—pursued a strategy of unified opposition to every Obama policy and initiative, including those they had recently supported, such as investment in infrastructure, health care reform and climate change. They also worked with their counterparts in cable television and talk radio to demonize every victory and to delegitimize the president.

The strategy worked to give Republicans smashing victories in midterm contests in 2010 and 2014. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said of the key Obama initiatives after the 2010 victory, “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals … Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.” But the price was reaffirming for a public already wary of politicians that leaders in Washington are not capable of solving problems for most Americans.

Today, incredibly, it’s even worse than it was. Continuing to fan the flames of hatred of Obama, Republican leaders openly acknowledged that little if anything of consequence would be considered by Congress during the last year of President Obama’s term, then trashed long-standing precedents by refusing to schedule the traditional hearings at which the Administration presents its budget or to even consider any presidential nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.

The spectacle of a political system with politicians unable to work together—thanks to McConnell and his House counterparts—contributed to a populist, anti-establishment wave, a contempt for the status quo that hit both parties but with far more resonance among Republicans. For the entirety of this year’s presidential campaign, anti-establishment, outsider candidates have garnered between 60 and 70 percent support among Republican voters. Donald Trump, America’s equivalent of European right-wing populists and possibly the most miscast presidential front-runner for a major party in American history, makes a mockery of the Republican establishment agenda and presages the GOP’s possible break-up. It is a self-inflicted wound, but one with disastrous consequences for us all.

The most promising route to a healthier democracy and less dysfunctional government almost certainly runs through the electoral process. Yet democratic accountability is not easily achieved during a period of polarized parties, divided government and hotly contested national races on an ever-diminishing competitive terrain, especially when that process is rigged to prevent decisive outcomes. The Trump disaster, especially if it leads to a Democratic sweep of the 2016 elections, may provide the basis for a major rethinking and realignment of a deeply dysfunctional Republican Party.

Then again, it may not.

      

 

 

This post is part of our project examining the importance of explanatory journalism. The introductory post is available here, and the second post on journalism in the digital age is available here. 

In the present-day world of media and politics, we live (as the saying goes) in the best of times and the worst of times.

A motivated consumer of information on politics and policy—the ideal citizen in a representative democracy—has access to an unprecedented number of sources of excellent journalism in a rich variety of formats and on numerous platforms. These include print, broadcast and online, long-form and short, data-based and graphically visualized, straight news and opinion journalism, legacy news organizations and new digital enterprises, mobile devices and social media, only a click away from direct access to vast repositories of official public documents and datasets. The digital revolution has laid waste to the 20^th century business models of news reporting and publication but even in these early days of the digital revolution, citizens seeking information about politicians, public policy, and government performance have resources never before imagined.

But how many such model citizens take advantage of these resources to exercise the popular sovereignty and democratic accountability at the core of our democracy? Most citizens are inadvertent consumers of news about politics and government, limited mostly to local television news dominated by crime, traffic and weather, with mere snippets of news related to public affairs, along with emails from family and friends forwarding materials that sound plausible but often are the opposite. Their lives are filled with responsibilities and interests that draw their attention away from election campaigns and policy battles. What little they know and learn about politics is often laden with misinformation and provides little basis for coming to public judgment beyond group identities, tribal loyalties and fleeting impressions of candidates and officeholders.

There is no magic media elixir to inform and engage those, including perennial nonvoters, so removed from the public life of the nation. But some division of labor is essential and inevitable in a representative democracy—between the general public and elected officials, but also between the entire citizenry and the tens of millions of citizens who engage in more active and demanding forms of political participation, including reading about and discussing public affairs with their fellow citizens. That is the target audience for explanatory journalism.

American democracy has come under severe strains in recent years. We’ve seen a precipitous decline of trust in its central political institutions, the radicalization of one of its two major political parties, a vehement oppositional politics in Congress that has turned divided party government into a graveyard for nominations, while turning legislative initiatives and congressional oversight into little more than a weapon of partisan warfare. All of this has been capped off with the emergence of a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination uniquely miscast for the office whose election would constitute a threat to American democracy and make a mockery of the U.S. leadership position in the world.

The roots of America’s dysfunctional politics are deep and complex. For our purposes here, it is sufficient to say that the media has done little to help the public understand what is amiss. An aggressively partisan talk radio, cable news, web and social media community has fueled a tribal politics that traffics in lies and conspiracies. The mainstream media has handcuffed itself out of fear of charges of partisan bias into antiseptic balanced treatment of both sides in spite of their obvious asymmetries. This pattern of false equivalence has served to reinforce a generalized, inchoate public distemper, one that is vulnerable to radical and anti-democratic appeals.

Explanatory journalism aspires to provide essential context to the hourly flood of news—not simply a separate fact-checking operation but the mobilization of a rich array of relevant information made possible by new technology but presented to the public in accessible and digestible formats. It is fact-based and data-rich but doesn’t shy away from making arguments that flow from the evidence—even at the risk of being charged with taking sides. It seeks to unravel the mysteries of policy and politics with historical and empirical context and speak openly and honestly about the stakes and drivers of our public life.

Ezra Klein pioneered two path breaking initiatives in explanatory journalism, first The Washington Post’s Wonkblog and now Vox.com. Many other news organizations are now embedding the elements of this approach into the routines of the news business. As David Leonhardt notes in the video part of this series, explanatory journalism will be successful when it is no longer a separate operation of news organizations but a central and unnamed part of their ongoing operations.

While it is no panacea for what ails American democracy, explanatory journalism is the most promising development in the rapidly changing world of media and politics.

      

 

 

The Democratic debate in New Hampshire, just days before the New Hampshire primary, is not actually about New Hampshire. The shape of the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination is set: after Iowa there is no winnowing of candidates to be done, coronation to be scheduled, or momentum to be generated. The outcome of next Tuesday’s election (at least on the Democratic side of the ballot) will have little bearing on what is certain to be an extended battle in state primaries and caucuses for convention delegates between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Neither a comfortable Sanders victory in New Hampshire nor a surprising Clinton win would change the basic calculus. Sanders will have sufficient resources from an amazingly successful small donor fundraising operation, an army of volunteers, and unusually strong appeal with the youngest cohort, and a novelty in the arena that belies his age and lifetime in politics to carry the fight to his opponent. Clinton retains considerable advantages in the face of the emergence of a serious contender. She has the overwhelming support of her peers and the extensive Democratic Party network. She enjoys a close and supportive relationship with President Obama. She remains very popular among Democrats, especially with minorities and women. Her side of the generational divide is more likely to vote. And by a wide margin, Democratic voters and analysts see her as the more electable candidate in November.

Both candidates have weaknesses as well as strengths. While he caucuses with them in the Senate, Sanders is not a Democrat. His socialist identity, even of the northern European social democratic variety, comes with considerable baggage in an American setting. His views and positions cluster at the liberal extreme in Congress. His rousing call for a “democratic revolution” has a romantic appeal but can be jarring in a country known for its pragmatism, incrementalism, and skepticism of utopias. Clinton bears the scars of decades of political attacks and investigations. Years of experience campaigning and governing at the highest levels of government gives her unmatched visibility but familiarity can breed contempt. Public anxiety generated by economic and social dislocation has been channeled by politicians into an inchoate and angry anti-Washington, anti-establishment sentiment that sits uncomfortably with political dynasties.

Thursday’s debate will launch a series of one-on-one encounters between Clinton and Sanders in which both candidates work to highlight their strengths and minimize or counter their weaknesses. But a much larger story about American politics is unfolding in this election, the culmination of years, indeed decades, of a radicalization of the Republican Party. It can no longer be credibly denied that the polarization between the parties is asymmetric. This has been apparent in Congress where Republicans have become intensely oppositional and unwilling or unable to engage in bargaining and compromise with a Democratic president, one whose very legitimacy they challenge. Now it is unfolding in a very prominent way in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.

Sanders and Clinton understandably place their highest priority on winning the Democratic presidential nomination. But their differences have less to do with values and goals than strikingly different theories of policy change in American politics. The open question is whether their personal competition will sharpen or obscure the profound and consequential divide between the two political parties. This debate and those that follow will help determine whether the Democrats emerge from a spirited contest with an electable candidate and a unified and enthused party well positioned to confront a radicalized Republican Party.

      

 

 

John Boehner is one happy man. Finally unleashed from the impossible demands of hotheaded and constitutionally-challenged members of his party, Speaker Boehner will leave office without the melodrama of a challenge to his office hanging over him and with confidence that government will not be shut down again under his watch. His departure from the speakership and the House is none too soon and probably a bit late, as he himself indicated. The failures of his speakership were not personal but driven by the radicalization of his party.

Ironically, his fellow Republican leaders are partly to blame. The “Young Guns” Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan encouraged the nascent Tea Party with their book in 2010, describing how the debt ceiling could be used as leverage to undo President Obama’s legislative achievements in 2009 and 2010. Ever since, Republican leaders in both the House and Senate have been over-promising what a Republican Congress could accomplish during divided party government.

Boehner is a Reagan conservative who has actually moved further to the right during his years in the House. But he is also a legislator who accepts the legitimacy of his political opposition and the importance of negotiation and compromise, and reveres the House as an institution. Both make him unsuitable to lead today’s Republican Party, which believes Democrats are the enemy, not the other party in government, and that the Congress is corrupt and feckless, as is government more broadly.

I can’t imagine whoever succeeds Boehner as Speaker doing any better at leading the hornet’s nest in the House. The chaos and dysfunctionality will continue until the Republican Party abandons its insurgency and once again aspires to pursue a conservative agenda within the framework of our Madisonian system.

      

 

 

Hillary Clinton’s release of her campaign finance proposals on Tuesday confirms there will be no significant substantive differences on political reform among the aspirants for the Democratic presidential nomination but a huge gulf between the two parties, whoever the nominees.

Harvard law professor and activist Larry Lessig announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination this past weekend based on the single issue of political reform, but his quixotic and gimmicky campaign is akin to carrying coals to Newcastle. His only difference with the other Democratic candidates is his insistence that political reform (primarily on campaign finance) should be of the highest priority and other concerns (immigration, wages, climate change, economic inequality, infrastructure, national security) should play second fiddle. Lessig apparently believes that Republican and independent voters will rally to his call and create a broad base of public support for bipartisan cooperation on changing the rules of the electoral game.

If only it were that simple. The gaping differences between the parties on campaign reform are both ideological and strategic. Republicans are more philosophically disposed to elevate free speech over political equality. They also realize that as presently constituted, their party is advantaged by fewer or no restrictions on money in politics, lower turnout among minorities and youth, and single-member districts. Democrats instinctively reject the argument that money is speech and are comfortable with using public authority to set and enforce the rules of democracy. But they also know that they would benefit from restrictions on big money in elections, guaranteed voting rights for all citizens, and a more proportional translation of votes into seats.

The Clinton campaign finance proposals generally follow the thrust of liberal reformers: building a counterforce to big money through multiple matching funds for small donors, increasing transparency by requiring timely disclosure of mega-contributions and transfers that now evade public scrutiny, and overturning Citizens United, which set the stage for a Wild West of outsized contributions and spending. Her support for a constitutional amendment to accomplish the latter is a pipedream and probably wouldn’t work if it were adopted. As she acknowledges, appointing Supreme Court justices to change the current 5-4 majority is the more promising route to the desired change.

Lessig’s dream notwithstanding, this particular agenda will be achieved only if and when Democrats manage to control both ends of Pennsylvania long enough to put the policies and a sympathetic Supreme Court in place. It’s an important choice for voters to consider in the 2016 elections but by no means the only or most pressing one.

      

 

 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published by the Institute of Governmental Studies. Thomas Mann is also Resident Scholar at IGS.

Donald Trump and the Amen chorus of Republican presidential aspirants may have appeared to monopolize the capacity to make fantastical claims about what’s wrong with America and how to fix it. But a rival has appeared on the scene, outlining a very different fantasy plan to run for president on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig looks meek—a dead ringer for Mr. Peepers—yet is anything but. Lessig built an impressive career in legal scholarship on the regulation of cyberspace, and the mild-mannered, soft-spoken academic became a cult hero among libertarians fearful of increasing legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and the electromagnetic spectrum. But Lessig’s transformation into a political activist was spurred by his personal revelation that money in politics is the root of all our governing problems. Eliminate the dependence of elected officials on private donors and the formidable obstacles to constructive policymaking will crumble. Simple but searing truth, or a caricature of a complex governing system shaped by institutions, ideas/ideologies, and interests?

Lessig became a whirlwind of energy and organization to promote his new values and beliefs, leading efforts to “Change Congress,” convene a second constitutional convention, raise awareness of corruption in politics through the “New Hampshire Rebellion,” and start the “Mayday PAC,” a super PAC designed to end all super PACs. He wrote the bestselling book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and A Plan to Stop It, delivered a series of popular TED talks, and tirelessly traveled the country with his PowerPoint.

With none of these enterprises yet bearing fruit, Lessig has decided to raise the stakes. He has announced that if he receives $1 million from small donors by September, he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination, running as a “referendum candidate.” His single-issue platform, built around the concept of “Citizen Equality,” consists of “true” campaign finance reform supplemented by electoral reform (to weaken the influence of gerrymandering) and voting rights. His goal is to use the election to build a mandate for political reform that will cure our democratic ills. Lessig will apparently have nothing to say about anything other than political reform, insisting that his issue should be and can be the number one priority of voters in the 2016 elections. If nominated and elected, President Lessig will serve in office only long enough to enact the Citizen Equality Act and then resign, turning over the powers and responsibilities of the office to the vice president. Recently he generously informed the Vice President that he would happily enable a third Joe Biden term by selecting him as his running mate.

The hubris of the Harvard Professor is breathtaking. In virtually every respect, his strategy is absurd. Lessig’s political reform agenda is stymied by Republicans, not Democrats. Why not direct his energies where the opposition resides? All of the current Democratic presidential candidates support the thrust of these reforms. But saying that this is their highest priority is likely to harm, not boost, their candidacies. Why would even the most ardent supporter of the three pillars of Lessig’s reform agenda cast a ballot solely on this basis? Big and important issues divide the two parties today and the stakes of public action or inaction are huge. We don’t have the luxury of using the election to try to build a mandate for a set of political reforms that would have no chance of passing in the face of GOP opposition and would be of only incremental utility if they did.

Campaign finance does play a corrosive role in our democracy and I have invested much of my career grappling with it. There is no doubt that money in elections facilitates the transfer of economic inequality into political inequality, and the spectacle of several hundred plutocrats dominating the finance of our elections should be a target of serious reform efforts in the courts and the Congress. At the same time it is foolish to imagine that campaign finance is the only route for private wealth to influence public policy or that its reform will dramatically transform the policy process. Money did not prevent the major legislative enactments of 2009-2010—including the stimulus, student loans, the Affordable Care Act, and financial services reform. Nor is it likely to be the critical factor on climate change, immigration, infrastructure or jobs and wages; which party wins the White House and whether control with Congress is unified or divided is key. If anything, the Lessig campaign is likely to weaken the forces for political reform by demonstrating just how small the relative priority for this action is.

Trump offers the country his outsider status, success in building his personal wealth, an outsized personality, a brashness in asserting how easily he can solve the country’s problems, and a hearty appetite for and skill in stoking the anger and fears of a segment of the country. He feeds the notion that a strong, fearless, wily leader, inexperienced and mostly uninformed in politics and governing, can be the man on a white horse saving a great country losing its exceptional status. His claim that all politicians are bought by private interests—a claim Lessig eagerly embraces—fits well with his grandiose claims that he alone can fix what ails the country. A significant segment of Republican voters, presumably not well versed in the American constitutional system are attracted to him, at least enough for him to be a factor in this election campaign.

Lessig is a far less commanding presence but his ambition burns no less than that of Trump. The notoriety, celebrity, and adoring audiences are heady stuff, even if on a much smaller scale. Lessig told Bloomberg that Trump’s candidacy is evidence that his reform message is taking hold. Lessig said, Trump “strikes people as credible when he says all these people (politicians) are bought—I used to buy them …Trump is saying the truth.” Lessig will be a minor figure in this election and the causes for which he fights are unlikely to advance from it. Both Lessig and Trump, despite their differences in visibility and importance in the election, will have contributed to the dumbing down of American politics, a reality that will bring tears to the eyes of civics teachers and political science professors across the country.

      

 

 

Two questions loom large in the aftermath of the first Republican debate of the 2016 election season. Will the Republican Party nominate a presidential candidate who by next November is viewed by a majority of Americans as a plausible choice for the White House–one whose character, political leadership skills, temperament, and views about America and its role in the world meet a threshold of acceptability? And just as importantly, will the Republican Party itself be trusted with control of all three branches of government given its sharp rightward turn ideologically and its high-risk, scorched-earth, no-compromise oppositional tactics during the Obama years?

Most of the press coverage has understandably focused on the first of these questions. Many of us wonder if Republican Party elites will once again succeed in nominating a candidate who by virtue of his or her personal traits and policy views can fully exploit their party’s opportunities in the coming general election. But it is not too early to begin asking whether what unites the seventeen aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination and shapes the party brand and agenda will limit its chances of regaining the White House or, if they nonetheless win the election, of governing successfully.

An excellent place to begin addressing the second question is a new paper by Jackie Calmes, national correspondent for The New York Times who was Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School this past spring. Its title, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing,” is a direct quote from one of her Republican sources. The subtitle, “Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” describes the focus of her impressive research, reporting, and analysis.

Calmes goes well beyond the familiar Fox News and talk-radio celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham to chart an expanding world of web-based “news” sites and social media outlets closely aligned with far-right groups such as Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. What began as a conservative insurgency nurtured and welcomed by the Republican establishment as a route to majority control of Congress has become a dominant force setting the party’s agenda and forcing repeated brinksmanship. This in turn impedes the Republicans’ ability to govern effectively and to win presidential elections.

She traces the evolution of conservative media from the end of World War II to the present, documenting a generational change enabled by new technology and business models. Her paper contains fascinating narrative on lesser-known personalities who have put themselves at the center of linkages between Republican activists and officeholders as well as case studies of why the Republican majority in Congress after the 2014 election has fallen well short of its stated objectives of restoring regular order and governing effectively.

Calmes searches for an equivalent liberal media but comes up mostly empty-handed. Her analysis of this striking difference between the ideological left and right sheds additional light on the broader asymmetric polarization between the parties.

It is easy, and certainly more professionally comfortable, for journalists as well as scholars to overlook the striking differences between the parties and instead place their primary emphasis during this political season on what can be a fascinating election game. But the half-life of many of these stories is very short and of dubious value to voters. Calmes wrestles with larger forces in our politics and governance in an enlightening and entertaining fashion.  Last night’s debate reveals it is those broader forces–the radicalization of the Republican Party and the conservative media that so powerfully enforces it–which merit a full airing in the fifteen months before the general election. Her paper deserves a wide and careful reading.

      

 

 

Editor's Note: For full disclosure, Tom Mann (joined by Norm Ornstein) filed an amicus curiae brief in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.

James Madison would be pleased. The 5-4 decision announced today by the Supreme Court upholding Arizona’s use of the initiative to establish an independent redistricting commission is a model of constitutional reasoning and statutory interpretation. It underscores the essential connection between republican government and popular sovereignty, in which the people have the ultimate authority over who shall represent them in public office. The majority opinion quotes Madison to powerful effect: “The genius of republican liberty seems to demand . . . not only that all power should be derived from the people, but those entrusted with it should be kept in dependence on the people.”

Madison worried about the dangers of the manipulation of electoral rules to serve the immediate interests of political actors. He was himself the target of a gerrymander designed (unsuccessfully) to deny him a seat in the first Congress. The Elections Clause of the Constitution, by granting Congress the power to override state actions setting the time, place and manner of elections, was designed partly as a safety valve to contain the abuse of power by those in a position to determine which voters will hold them accountable.

Today’s intensely polarized politics drive major partisan campaigns to seize control of the redistricting authority in the states and to wield that power to boost prospects for majority standing in the House. Partisan gerrymandering is not the major source of our dysfunctional politics but it surely reinforces and exacerbates the tribal wars between the parties. A number of states have used the initiative device provided in their constitutions to establish independent commissions to replace or supplement the regular state legislative process in redrawing congressional and/or state legislative district boundaries. Such commissions are no panacea for partisan gerrymandering. Their composition and rules vary in ways that can shape the outcome. But the evidence suggests they can mitigate the conflicts of interest that are a part of the regular process and produce more timely plans less subject to judicial preemption.

The Court has upheld the right of those states to legislate electoral rules through a popular vote. Had the minority position prevailed, state laws governing many aspects of the electoral process would have been subject to constitutional challenge. And an important safety value available to the people of the states for responding to abuses of power by those in public office has been preserved.

This should not be read more broadly as a triumph of direct democracy over representative government. Many scholars who provided expert opinion supporting the majority opinion retain serious concerns about the overuse and misuse of initiatives and referendums. Instead, the decision strengthens the legitimacy of representative democracy by reinforcing the essential link between republican government and popular sovereignty.

     

 

 

It is not obvious that the memoir of a recently-retired, sixteen-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives is a promising candidate for a series reviewing books on government reform. Vivid narrative, compelling personal stories, passionate advocacy, and lacerating wit may make for a great read. And Barney Frank’s Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage is an enlightening and entertaining romp through a half-century of American politics and policymaking. But what can it possibly offer as a guide to fixing government during an era of polarization, dysfunction, and public disaffection?

The short answer is more than you might think. Frank’s life in politics spanned a period in which most Americans lost their faith in government’s capacity (or willingness) to improve the lot of working and middle-class citizens but also became more accepting of personal differences, particularly on matters of sexuality. These changes in public opinion were neither gradual nor without intense conflict but a reflection of powerful economic and social forces, pitched battles within and between the political parties, and growing generational differences. Their residue today defines in large part the warring political camps that hinder effective public policy and administration.

Frank himself is a bundle of seeming contradictions. An unabashed liberal adept at the give and take of party politics and the nuances of the legislative craft. A man whose gruff manner and disheveled appearance could not disguise his uproarious sense of humor. A whip-smart Harvard educated man (BA, ABD in political science, and law degree) with a stronger affinity for the little guys in Fall River and New Bedford than the Boston elites. A powerful debater whose rapier wit intimidated many an unprepared adversary who at the same time respected those with sincere opposing views, welcomed bargaining with Republicans, and defended the much-maligned Congress. A gay man closeted for decades out of fear that revealing his sexual orientation would destroy his chosen life in politics reaches the pinnacle of his career in public life—the Dodd-Frank financial reform law—while in a highly visible and by all accounts happy and rewarding same-sex marriage.

Frank played a key role in significant achievements on behalf of economic fairness and personal freedom, but he regularly resisted the emotional, ideologically-driven, non-negotiable demands of his allies in favor of painstaking efforts for bankable incremental steps. He had little use for radicals of the left or right. He took as given that a private market economy is essential to prosperity but a competent and sufficiently-resourced government must act to protect society from market failures and to provide essential public goods. He spurned the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” argument that working class whites are fooled into voting against their economic interests by Republican appeals to their religious and cultural conservatism. Instead, Frank believes the problem is that the government championed by Democrats has been unable to overcome the decades-long stagnation of wages and declining opportunities for upward economic and social mobility.

Frank’s descriptions of his own personal odyssey and his reflections on American society and politics over the past fifty years remind us of the many forces that contribute to success and failure in policy making and implementation. (It will be obvious to the reader that these summaries are my words, not his.) They also caution would-be reformers on the efficacy of tweaking institutional rules and procedures without simultaneously considering how political actors will respond to them.

• Deep and abiding pessimism about democracy in America is unwarranted and counter-productive. Policy success—in both enactment and implementation—is possible when the context is favorable, an opportunity arises in the political system, and skilled politicians do the difficult work to identify constructive steps and build the necessary support for them. The responses to the 2008 financial crisis in the last months of the Bush Administration and the first months of the Obama presidency are a good example of how the normal barriers to action can be overcome. Building congressional capacity and defending the institutional prerogatives and responsibilities of Congress are important if only for the limited opportunities when constructive action is possible.
• Policy change is usually incremental and follows long periods of incubation and temporary defeat, but rapid shifts in public opinion (e.g. same-sex marriage) and demands for action in the face of crisis (often from elite actors) can precipitate more ambitious responses. Whether incremental or transformational, lawmaking is an honorable task; those members of Congress who are as good as their word and practice the legislative craft skillfully should be praised, not scorned.
• Political parties are the essential building blocks of democracy. The diverse Democratic coalition of northern liberals and southern conservatives made possible nominal party majorities in Congress but often frustrated the policy ambitions of its leaders. During the last years of the conservative coalition, Republican liberals and moderates provided the margin of victory on such issues as civil rights, the environment and immigration. As the parties became more internally homogeneous and ideologically distinct, cross-party collaboration became much more difficult. And when Democrats lost their long-term domination of Congress, the intense competition for party control of the House and Senate increased purely strategic behavior by the parties and decreased opportunities for substantive lawmaking across party lines.
• The two parties have evolved in distinctive ways over the last decades, further complicating the challenges of governing. Representing a one-party state, Frank had his problems with Democratic radicals and left-wing theorists who came of age in the countercultural and anti-war sixties. This might come as a surprise for someone who favored gay rights and drug legalization and worked for Representative Michael Harrington, a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. Throughout the book, Frank refers to himself as a liberal, never a progressive. His differences with the “new left” had mostly to do with their tactics, insensitivity to the values and reactions of working class Democrats, and indiscriminant condemnation of military engagement overseas. Those divisions and excesses of the Democratic Party took years to overcome. By the mid-1990s the Democrats had become a relatively unified center/left party, one that supported government, civil rights and a liberal internationalism. Democrats were willing to work with President George W. Bush, both before and after 9/11, but their eventual opposition to the war in Iraq and return to the majority in Congress after the 2006 elections set up a more confrontational stance with the Republican president. Democrats were remarkably unified during President Obama’s first two years in office, as well after 2010 with the returned of divided party government.
• Republicans became a more conservative party after 1980, as they absorbed the formerly Democratic South, and under President Reagan embraced an agenda of lower taxes and less government, social and religious fundamentalism, and a neoconservative foreign policy. Reagan provided the rhetorical leadership, initial tax and spending cuts, and a tough-minded approach to foreign policy, but proved to be quite pragmatic in the face of increasing deficits, a tougher Democratic opposition, and an opening for nuclear arms reduction agreement with a Gorbachev-led Soviet Union. President George H.W. Bush’s impressive foreign policy leadership on the successful first gulf war and the end of the Cold War did nothing to assuage the outrage of conservative activists when he broke his “no new taxes” pledge in a deficit reduction agreement with the Democrats. By the time Bush 41 left office, the tax pledge became the centerpiece of the Republican agenda and a litmus test for those running and serving in public office under its banner. Newt Gingrich led the Republican opposition in Congress on a long but ultimately successful campaign to win a majority in Congress by discrediting Congress as an institution and delegitimizing the “corrupt Democratic majority.” The partisan war against Clinton, bookended by a unanimous Republican vote against his initial budget deficit package and his impeachment by the House, was a precursor to the unified Republican opposition to Obama. Negative conservative reaction to Bush 43, especially to his compassionate conservative rhetoric, expansion of Medicare, massive spending on homeland security, and support of TARP to deal with the financial crisis led the Republicans in Congress to embrace a radical agenda and an even more confrontational stance with Obama. The Tea Party became the Republican Party. Obama was proclaimed not to be a legitimate president or real American. Government is the root of all problems the country confronts. Climate change is a hoax. Science is a playpen for liberals. Compromise is cowardice.
• This asymmetric party polarization has turned divided party government into a graveyard for presidential proposals, especially Democrats’, and an invitation for the opposition party in Congress to damage or nullify legitimately enacted laws during the implementation process. Unified party government with large majorities in the Senate and House can still enact major legislation but the unwillingness of the opposition party to buy into the process and accept the outcome ensures substantial public opposition continuing after enactment and policy instability.
• Spirited and biting debate between parties with substantial differences in values and policy preferences can be a strength of the political system if both parties accept the legitimacy of the other and have incentives to engage in genuine deliberation and produce a negotiated outcome. Reforms predicated on blurring differences, identifying a golden mean, restoring civility, or ignoring powerful incentives for strategic disagreement are doomed to fail.

While Frank makes none of these points as explicitly as I do here, I am confident from reading his memoir that he agrees with all of them. He brings life, passion and humor to these sober observations and demonstrates why politics and government should be and sometimes can be a noble and uplifting undertaking.

     

 

 

Editor's Note: Government failure is something everyone complains about, but does little to address. Over the next two weeks, FixGov will review work on government reform: identifying problems in the federal government and offering solutions to get government back in working order. In this post, Thomas Mann reviews The Blunders of Our Governments, by political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe.

In the swamp of our extreme party polarization and dysfunctional government, we are apt to find ourselves yearning for a more decisive political system, one not prone to gridlock, constrained by multiple veto points, or vulnerable to interest group demands. We, as a society, long for a government capable of linking well-developed policies with pragmatic implementation strategies and managed by a highly competent civil service. That is to say, we are yearning for Westminster-style parliamentary government.

If you find yourself falling under that spell, the best antidote is to pick up a copy of The Blunders of Our Governments (Oneworld Publications, 2014), written by the distinguished and politically-savvy political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. The authors are erudite and entertaining—rigorous in analyzing the endless “cock-ups” in British politics over the past three-and-a-half decades and hilarious in recounting the colorful details. They are blind neither to comparable failures in the private sector nor to notable successes of UK governments past and present. This is most assuredly not a jeremiad against government, but instead a thoughtful exploration of why its initiatives often and unnecessarily fail.

King and Crewe draw their title and subject matter from James Madison’s ruminations in the Federalist Papers about the “many monuments of deficient wisdom” in the work of America’s thirteen original states. They define a blunder “as an episode in which a government adopts a specific course of action in order to achieve one or more objectives and, as a result largely or wholly of its own mistakes, either fails completely to achieve those objectives, or does achieve some or all of them but at a totally disproportionate cost, or else does achieve some or all of them but contrives at the same time to cause a significant amount of collateral damage in the form of unintended and undesired consequences.” Failures flowing from judgment calls, in circumstances of uncertainty and on the basis of limited evidence, are not defined as blunders, nor are controversial government initiatives which pursue objectives not shared by the authors or other people. Not all mistakes made by governments are a result of blunders; some are sins of omission rather than commission, reflecting inattention to chronic problems.

The authors also distinguish between blunders and scandals. Most political scandals in Britain have nothing to do with blunders as the authors define them, more involving sex, petty crime and low-grade financial malpractice than gross governmental incompetence. Finally, the actions of government need to be judged only in the fullness of time. Initiatives widely regarded as blunders at an early stage of their lives may look better later on. The reverse may be true as well.

Blunders have been a feature of governments since the beginning of time. King and Crewe very briefly review some of the historical highlights (or lowlights) and the postwar British experience before examining systematically their country’s experience in recent decades. The horror stories begin with the Thatcher government’s colossal blunder introducing a poll tax in the 1980s.Their judgment couldn’t be harsher: “The poll tax failed to achieve its objectives, led to rioting in the streets, wasted many millions of pounds, occasioned much human misery and ultimately cost the prime minister her job. . . Every dire prediction made about the poll tax was sooner or later fulfilled. . . In the end, their failure was abject and total.”

What follows is a series of concise but richly informative case studies of telling blunders by a succession of Conservative, New Labour, and Tory-led Coalition governments. These include the mis-selling of personal pensions, in which the full scale of the debacle was clearly foreseen by key observers but ignored by a Conservative government that blithely went its own way; an initially popular but ultimately universally condemned program to reduce the dependence on public benefits of children of single mothers by extracting support from absent fathers; a decision to exit the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Community, with profoundly negative consequences for the British economy in the short term and for the Conservative party over the longer term; the conspicuous flop of The New Millennium Experience, known widely as “the Dome”, the principal manifestation of New Labour’s post-1997 “Cool Britannia” project; the birth and sudden death of individual learning accounts, a program central to the public philosophy of Tony Blair and his New Labour party advisors; the botched effort, led by Gordon Brown as shadow chancellor, chancellor and prime minister, to import from the United States the strikingly effective Earned Income Tax Credit; a failed effort to extract from criminals the proceeds of their criminal activities; the UK government’s inability, over many years, to pay England’s farmers in good order and time the monies owing to them from the European Union; a series of egregious IT blunders, with serious harm to individuals and firms and at massive costs to British taxpayers, culminating in “the veritable RMS Titanic of IT disasters: the doomed-from-the-beginning NHS National Program for IT;” a costly though not widely known public-private partnership (PPP or “Metronet”) for the maintenance and upgrading of the London underground, established by New Labour in 1998, R.I.P. 2007; and the abortive effort by a Labour government to establish national identity cards.

King and Crewe, following their own guideline to judge the actions of government in the fullness of time, are careful not to identify the blunders of David Cameron’s administration. But their pessimism and growing concern about the blunder-prone British government comes through loud and clear in an epilogue which identifies many signs of botched policy ventures, none more striking than the radical overhaul of the National Health Service in England, and little evidence that the Coalition government has learned from the failures of its predecessors. Interestingly, they suspend judgment on what may prove to be the most consequential of actions taken by this government—the macroeconomic management of David Cameron and George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Here, the authors see mainly difficult judgment calls and high uncertainty over the ultimate consequences which cannot be dismissed as outright blunders. “The present government’s macroeconomic policies may possibly be misguided, but they are hardly the product of either stupidity or carelessness.”

King and Crewe have much to say about why British government is so blunder-prone. These are the sections of the book—Part III on human errors and Part IV on system failures—that will be of most interest and utility to those concerned about governmental dysfunction in the United States. In spite of the considerable constitutional, institutional and historical differences between the two countries, it is instructive to view one country’s experiences (and struggles) with the formulation and implementation of public policies through the lenses of the other. I hasten to add, such an effort comes not with the expectation of identifying simple transfers of policies or unknown best public management practices but rather to deepen our understanding of the successes and failures of our own system of government.

The authors find human factors more generally—not the shortcomings of specific individuals—to be partly to blame for the blunders of government. Cultural disconnect between politicians and civil servants, on the one hand, and citizens, on the other, is one such factor. Projecting onto others sets of values, attitudes and whole ways of life that are not remotely like their own can produce assumptions that are radically wrong. Group-think in government councils is another. The authors describe intellectual prejudices as unquestioned beliefs embodying informal theories on how the world works now and how it could be made to work in the future. These prejudices fiercely work against reality testing and pragmatism. The outcome is an operational disconnect between policymaking and implementation that is another frequent source of blunders by government. Finally, ministers and senior officials are sometimes fail to put in the hard work necessary to make policies successful because they simply lack the motivation to do so. “Panic, symbols and spin” frequently predominate over problem solving.

King and Crewe’s exploration of system failures merits the closest attention. The similarities between our two countries are surprising. British government is not a single, unified entity but a conglomerate of fragmented, disparate agencies and actors. And prime ministers have less command and control of their administrations than is commonly thought. Number 10 may be too weak to ride herd over warring departments and impetuous ministers.

The rapid turnover of ministers robs the government of experience and expertise at critical junctures of policy development and implementation. And since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister with strong convictions, great ambitions, and deep skepticism of the traditional civil service, ministers are expected to be activists—the dynamos of change—not compliant partners of senior officials. That has made the latter reluctant to speak truth to power. Yet those ministers are seldom held accountable for the blunders that occur under their watch. Ministerial accountability remains very much a myth in contemporary British politics, with blame being directed to the ever-silenced civil service.

Asymmetries of expertise and knowledge haunt government at almost every level. UK government, like that in the United States, depends heavily on outside contractors for the design and delivery of public services. It has become increasingly ill-equipped and unprepared to manage the complex projects associated with new policy initiatives and oftentimes relies on private firms to oversee the work of the vast private workforce of government.

King and Crewe describe parliament as largely peripheral to policy development and implementation. No surprise there. “Parliament as an institution occasionally barks, frequently nips at its master’s heels but very seldom actually bites.”

All of these factors, in the authors’ view, turn the impressive advantage of British government—the freedom to take decisive action—into a liability. “The only trouble with a system in which it is easy to take decisions is that it is every bit as easy to take the wrong decisions.” What makes British government so blunder-prone is its deficit of deliberation. A power-hoarding system weighs against a careful and informed weighing of options. The mass media is antithetical to deliberation. Intense partisanship is also its enemy.

The situation is even worse than that. British governments are not just blunder-prone but slow off the mark. “They have left things undone that sorely needed to be done. . . In truth, they prevaricate, procrastinate and defer as often as they decide.”

The book offers sober conclusions, especially to American reformers looking across the Atlantic for ways of improving government performance. Yet the richness of their analysis of the blunders of British governments could and should upgrade the thinking about how best to deal with the problems of politics and policymaking in our own.

     

 

 

One can already hear the catcalls from the early release of the centerpiece of President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union speech. His focus on an explicit redistribution of income through the tax code from the top 1 percent to the 99 percent is hardly a basis of legislative cooperation with the Republican Congress during the last two years of his presidency. Instead of seeking common ground to set the stage for bipartisan cooperation, he will use the opportunity to sharpen differences between the parties, particularly on taxing the wealthy.

And a good thing he has made that choice. Except for the handful of matters on which legislative action cannot be avoided (such as funding the government, extending the debt ceiling, and reauthorizing such essential government activities as defense and infrastructure) or that manage to stay below the surface of ideological or partisan conflict, there is no potential for productive cooperation during this period of divided party government. The President’s public embrace of a policy is usually sufficient to ensure overwhelming Republican opposition.

His dreams of a postpartisan politics were naïve when first articulated in 2004 and shattered shortly after coming to the White House. This speech is the latest in a series of actions reflecting his acceptance of that reality and his determination to make the most of the leverage for leadership available to him.

A stronger economy opens the way for a more ambitious concentration on stagnant middle class wages and inequality of economic opportunity. Solutions to these problems are substantively vexing and politically daunting, but little progress is possible without increased public investments and a more productive use of the tax code. That will require a different politics—with an altered public philosophy, a Republican Party less driven by an indiscriminate quest for smaller and weaker government, and a Democratic Party willing and able to restore purpose and capacity to public service.

President Obama’s speech seems likely to be a constructive step in that direction.

     

 

 

Sawhill’s summary of Amitai Etzioni’s provocative discussion of “Is There a Gridlock” in his new book, The New Normal, ends with the Pogo Principle: “we have met the enemy, and it is us.” There is much to be said for that argument. The electorate produces the governments that it subsequently distrusts, denounces, and finds unresponsive. Etzioni’s version of this chestnut is built around the ideological congruence between voters and policies. The American citizenry has long been and continues to be more conservative than liberal. The American government, including the 2008-2012 period under review, produces conservative policies. Ergo: the American political system successfully produces democratic responsiveness. Yet the public shows every sign of being unhappy getting what they want. Is the problem the public, our political system, or our theory of democracy?

Interesting questions, thoughtfully addressed. But the disconnect between policy congruence and public dissatisfaction with government may not be as mysterious as it first appears. Etzioni himself provides some of the most important clues. First, many have noted that Americans are both ideological conservatives and operational liberals. They are skeptical of government in general but supportive, even demanding, of concrete government programs. Popular majorities favoring minimum wage increases, higher taxes on the wealthy, infrastructure spending, comprehensive immigration reform, and protection of the environment are not being well served by conservative opposition to these policies.

Second, public assessments of government are based less on policies enacted or defeated than on outcomes that materially affect their well-being, such as good jobs with livable wages. The latter are often shaped by powerful forces beyond the reach of policies. The economy shapes presidential success more than the president shapes the economy.

Third, the 111^th Congress, Obama’s first, was disputatious and produced no liberal utopia, but by contemporary American standards it was unusually productive – one that enacted policies long on the moderate and liberal wish list. The divided party government that followed was dramatically different, one featuring levels of brinksmanship, hostage-taking and nullification not seen in many decades. The public had much to be unhappy with.

Following the global financial crisis and Great Recession, America is doing better than most other countries. Since late 2009, the economy has been growing, unemployment declining, deficits dropping, stock markets climbing, and corporate profits out of sight. Stagnant wages, growing inequality and limited social mobility have limited the gains from this economic renaissance to the upper crust. That is the big disconnect in our politics, one that is substantively real and a major source of public discontent.

     

 

 

“The Republican Party has become like a parliamentary party, vehemently oppositional and opposed to anything that the other party would do,” says Thomas Mann in this podcast in which he shares his expertise and insight on political dysfunction in America, on the roots of today’s divisive partisanship, on ideas for solutions, and on the 2016 presidential contest. Mann, a senior fellow in Governance Studies and the W. Averell Harriman Chair in American Governance, also reflects on his 45 years studying and engaging with the political scene in Washington, sharing what he has seen, heard and done along the way.

Also, read what Mann wrote about President Obama's immigration executive order and Republicans' response. 

In his regular segment on what's happening in Congress, Fellow John Hudak explains what Congress is doing now that the midterm elections are over. He focuses on the new confirmation environment for the president and also how congressional Republicans will react to Obama's executive action on immigration. 

• It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (with Norman Ornstein)
• Which Republican Party Won the Midterms?
• 2014 Midterms Post-Election Special (podcast)
• 2014 Midterms: Why the Election Will Matter... and Why It Won't
• Party Polarization and Campaign Finance
• Pew Research Center poll

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen on Stitcher, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.