Week Six: Other Perspectives
This current Our American Values series focuses on four perennial threats that surface whenever American Democracy is most at risk: 1) Political polarization, 2) Conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community, 3) High and growing economic inequality, and 4) Excessive executive power.
In this sixth and final week, we turn to a summative print piece, including some video links, from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. In this “Politics Chat” piece originally posted on January 12, FiveThirtyEight does what it does so well — aggregates multiple sources of data and different perspectives in a single place for readers to consider and make their own judgments. In this case, those perspectives come from: Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America and author of the book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America; Jennifer McCoy, a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University and co-editor of Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy; Cyrus Samii, an associate professor of politics at New York University and co-author of the book Diversity, Violence, and Recognition; and, of course, Sarah Frostenson, Politics Editor of FiveThirtyEight.
“…If you believe in political scientist Samuel Huntington’s theory that there is a 60-year cycle of democracy reform movements — that every six decades or so, American democracy falls short of its democratic ideals and reform movements emerge to expand our democracy, we’re right on schedule.”