Introduction Professor Kang raises two fundamental worries about the associational path to party reform in The Problem of Irresponsible Party Government, his response to my essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights and the Pursuit of Responsive Party Government. First, he doubts the feasibility of reestablishing thick relational parties given social, technological, and cultural changes […]
Political Polarization
This Reply addresses the responses by Professors David Bernstein and Jed Shugerman to our essay Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball. Bernstein’s response, we argue, commits the common fallacy of equating reciprocity with symmetry: assuming that because constitutional hardball often “takes two” to play, both sides must be playing it in a similar manner. Shugerman’s response, on the other hand, helps combat the common fallacy of equating...
The “constitutional hardball” metaphor used by legal scholars and political scientists illuminates an important phenomenon in American politics, but it obscures a crisis in American democracy. In baseball, hardball encompasses legitimate tactics: pitching inside to brush a batter back but not injure, hard slides, hard tags. Baseball fans celebrate hardball. Many of the constitutional hardball maneuvers previously identified by scholars have...
Introduction American party politics may be as nationally competitive as they have ever been, but at the same time they are perhaps as unresponsive to average citizens as they have been in a long time. It is this paradox that Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj creatively interrogates in her essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights […]
This Response addresses Professors Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen’s Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball. Fishkin and Pozen argue that Republicans have engaged in “asymmetric constitutional hardball” since 1993. This Response accepts the authors’ contention that Republicans have increasingly engaged in constitutional hardball but casts doubt on the purported asymmetry.
Part I questions whether one of the authors’ primary examples...
Many have argued that the United States’ two major political parties have experienced “asymmetric polarization” in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of constitutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican officeholders have been more likely...