Volume 8, Issue 2

In a sense, all the parties lost the British General Election of 2010. However, a number of factors including the skilled leadership of David Cameron resulted in the creation of a governing coalition composed of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats that would have seemed highly implausible before and during the election campaign. The coalition, the first to be formed outside a national emergency since Britain became a democracy raises interesting questions about how its “Westminster Model” system will adapt.

In the contemporary age of party polarization, moderate members of Congress have found their electoral fortunes to be dependent upon their party’s control of the House. Whether Democrat or Republican, members of moderate factions surprisingly receive considerably more support—in terms of electoral strategy and finances—when their party is in the minority and less when it is in the majority. This paper examines the electoral challenges faced by members of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition and the Republican Main Street Partnership in the election cycles of 1994 to 2008.

For the first time since 1968, the election of Barack Obama raises the possibility of a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. In this article, I assess whether such an “Obama Court” would lead to significant constitutional change. Drawing on research regarding both the internal dynamics of the Supreme Court and the effect of the Court’s external environmental, I develop four benchmarks that historically correlate with more rapid and significant constitutional change. Taking each benchmark in turn, I argue that an Obama Court would lack the vision, the desire, and the power to fundamentally reshape the constitutional status quo. Instead, an Obama Court would likely be a mirror image of the later Rehnquist years, drifting to the left on the resolution of some constitutional problems, but in essence remaining a “chastened” institution mainly limited to incremental doctrinal change.

We use the list-experiment methodology to address three questions raised by the presidential candidacy and election of Barack Obama. First, to what degree did white voters hold feelings of racial antipathy toward blacks as a group in 2008? Second, were those feelings manifest in their response to Obama's candidacy and subsequent election as president? Third, to what degree did whites actually take pride in the nomination and election of an African American to the nation's highest office? Our analysis of four statewide surveys in Florida shows that few white voters were upset by Obama's electoral achievements, and many took some pride in his historic candidacy and election. Nevertheless, substantial racism still appears to linger in Florida.

This paper argues that African-American House legislators have become less radical, engaging in less forceful ideological battles with the Democratic Party over its policy leadership. They have become simultaneously more prone to support policy leadership from Democratic presidents as well. This argument is based on a study of floor votes by black legislators on budget resolutions in the Carter and Clinton administrations, as well as an analysis of presidential support and party unity scores from 1977 to 2008 in CQ Almanacs. Since the 1990s, based on a number of factors, black House members are less likely to challenge Democratic presidential and party leadership as radical voices on the political left. This decline in black radicalism, I contend, has implications for the concept of African-American politics as an organized challenge to the racial status of blacks.

Sarah Palin’s public image to date has been one of novelty and inconsistency. Yet her political career is anything but novel. Her political decisions, career history, and public pronouncements have firm roots in a particular model of women in politics in the frontier west. This article examines the parallels, comparing Palin’s political career with those of other political women of the west. The research draws on personal interviews with over fifty women elected officials, on the literature related to women in politics, and on the history of political women in the American west.

The nation-wide cycle of redistricting is the most consequential, repetitive decision-making process shaping the nature of American democracy. Because the arrangement of the districts forms an essential part of the “rules of the game,” the process by which they are drawn is meta-politics or a quasi-constitution making activity. The research on this process is voluminous and includes bits and pieces of the process. But the process is complicated, in part because the criteria for redistricting are in conflict with one another. The criteria include considerations of political geography, physical features, community of interest, one person one vote, race and ethnicity, partisanship, contiguity, compactness, recognition of local political boundaries, incumbents’ addresses, and desires for minimal change. The literature also covers the use of geographic information systems in the process and possible reforms. But no overall theory of redistricting has been developed which includes all these features.

This article looks ahead to the 2010 congressional redistricting cycle, and makes the case that the concern over the pernicious effects of partisan redistricting has been significantly over-exaggerated. Those attempting to use partisan control of the apparatus of state government to influence future elections operate under a number of significant constraints, from legal and political factors that inhibit the redistricting process and frequently result in compromise or litigation, to geographical and structural factors that dictate the extent to which electoral boundaries can be effectively manipulated to produce deviations from partisan symmetry. Evidence from the 1990 and 2000 redistricting cycles indicates that the benefits of partisan gerrymandering, where present, are extremely susceptible to subsequent electoral swings. This casts considerable doubt on the utility of partisan gerrymandering as a mechanism for instituting long-term electoral bias in congressional elections.