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Purchase article. How does it work? Select the purchase option. Check out using a credit card or bank account with PayPal. Read your article online and download the PDF from your email or your account. Why register for an account? Column: Lost Naval Academy ring triggers amazing story of connections. Stocks rallied last week in the wake of election results with all three major indexes up at least 6 percent. Analysts attributed the movement to a favorable scenario where a Republican Senate dilutes the power of a Democratic president, limiting his ability to enact tax increases or antitrust regulation against big tech companies.
As of the morning of Nov. Still, there were other concerns for the economy addressed late last week as the likelihood of a Biden victory seemed more possible, as well as the Democrats controlling the House and Republicans the Senate. The larger fiscal stimulus under an undivided government might be expected to provide a greater boost to GDP growth over the next several years.
YES: Historically, a divided government leads to stability e. Predictability allows for stable long-term planning. Large swings to the left or the right in government leads to uncertainty in particular industries. Divided government creates certainty, and in turn, tends to be good for the economy.
YES : While it can certainly block needed legislation, such is now the case with stimulus funds, it can have several benefits. It can prevent the more extreme elements of either party from causing radical economic changes that could be highly disruptive. A divided government does not mean gridlock if both sides choose to work together constructively.
YES: Designers of the U. A free and unbridled economy capable of responding to marketplace demands operates best unrestricted from centrally planned directive. A divided, even gridlocked government constrains extreme and ill thought-out policies that interfere with the best functioning economic environment serving both buyers and sellers.
With Trump out of the way, this will be a legislative priority, regardless of party. While we can expect continued gridlock in the Senate, especially on health care and environmental legislation, President Biden understands the art of compromise, which is the byproduct of divided government. This can actually lead to good legislation, however meek and tentative. A split allows, and in fact encourages a healthy discussion of issues, approaches and spending levels.
I think the business community, and therefore the stock market is most comfortable with this ongoing dialogue between our government leaders. But it is essential to come to a conclusion and take action when needed. NO : When the economy is doing well, it might be the case that a divided government is good to prevent one party from going to excesses. But the country is now facing big problems with the coronavirus and the economy, which are linked to each other. Quick action needs to be taken to provide relief to millions of people.
A divided government willing at the very least delay action and may prevent it in important areas such as aid to state and local governments.
YES : If we look back over previous eras, when we have had a Democratic president and a split Congress, markets have done quite well. In this case, it would mean no major tax hikes, no progressive green agenda, no public option for health care, and not much in the way of major changes.
These groups served as a filter of sorts as they tried to meet the demands of local markets. Television was a powerful tool, with national news and editorial content that provided the same message across the country. The expansion of news coverage to cable, and the consolidation of local news providers into big corporate conglomerates, amplified this nationalization.
Average citizens were just as likely to learn what it meant to be a Republican from a politician in another state as from one in their own, and national news coverage made it much more difficult for politicians to run away from their votes.
The information explosion that followed the heyday of network TV by way of cable, the Internet, and blogs has furthered this nationalization trend. A final possible cause for polarization is the increasing sophistication of gerrymandering , or the manipulation of legislative districts in an attempt to favor a particular candidate. Taking extreme or one-sided positions on a large number of issues would be hazardous for a member who needs to build a diverse electoral coalition. But if the district has been drawn to favor a particular group, it now is necessary for the elected official to serve only the portion of the constituency that dominates.
Gerrymandering is a centuries-old practice. There has always been an incentive for legislative bodies to draw districts in such a way that sitting legislators have the best chance of keeping their jobs.
But changes in law and technology have transformed gerrymandering from a crude art into a science. Supreme Court in Before then, it was common for many states to practice redistricting , or redrawing of their electoral maps, only if they gained or lost seats in the U.
House of Representatives. This can happen once every ten years as a result of a constitutionally mandated reapportionment process, in which the number of House seats given to each state is adjusted to account for population changes. But if there was no change in the number of seats, there was little incentive to shift district boundaries. After all, if a legislator had won election based on the current map, any change to the map could make losing seats more likely. Even when reapportionment led to new maps, most legislators were more concerned with protecting their own seats than with increasing the number of seats held by their party.
As a result, some districts had gone decades without significant adjustment, even as the U. By the early s, some electoral districts had populations several times greater than those of their more rural neighbors. However, in its one-person-one-vote decision in Reynolds v. Several states therefore had to make dramatic changes to their electoral maps during the next two redistricting cycles — and — Map designers, no longer certain how to protect individual party members, changed tactics to try and create safe seat s so members of their party could be assured of winning by a comfortable margin.
The basic rule of thumb was that designers sought to draw districts in which their preferred party had a 55 percent or better chance of winning a given district, regardless of which candidate the party nominated.
Of course, many early efforts at post- Reynolds gerrymandering were crude since map designers had no good way of knowing exactly where partisans lived. At best, designers might have a rough idea of voting patterns between precincts, but they lacked the ability to know voting patterns in individual blocks or neighborhoods.
They also had to contend with the inherent mobility of the U. Designers were often forced to use crude proxies for party, such as race or the socio-economic status of a neighborhood. Some maps were so crude they were ruled unconstitutionally discriminatory by the courts. Examples of gerrymandering in Texas, where the Republican-controlled legislature redrew House districts to reduce the number of Democratic seats by combining voters in Austin with those near the border, several hundred miles away.
Today, Austin is represented by six different congressional representatives. Proponents of the gerrymandering thesis point out that the decline in the number of moderate voters began during this period of increased redistricting. But it was not until later, they argue, that the real effects could be seen. A second advance in redistricting, via computer-aided map making, truly transformed gerrymandering into a science.
Refined computing technology, the ability to collect data about potential voters, and the use of advanced algorithms have given map makers a good deal of certainty about where to place district boundaries to best predetermine the outcomes.
These factors also provided better predictions about future population shifts, making the effects of gerrymandering more stable over time. Proponents argue that this increased efficiency in map drawing has led to the disappearance of moderates in Congress. According to political scientist Nolan McCarty, there is little evidence to support the redistricting hypothesis alone. First, he argues, the Senate has become polarized just as the House of Representatives has, but people vote for Senators on a statewide basis.
There are no gerrymandered voting districts in elections for senators. Research showing that more partisan candidates first win election to the House before then running successfully for the Senate, however, helps us understand how the Senate can also become partisan. Furthermore, polarization has been occurring throughout the country, but the use of increasingly polarized district design has not. While some states have seen an increase in these practices, many states were already largely dominated by a single party such as in the Solid South but still elected moderate representatives.
Some parts of the country have remained closely divided between the two parties, making overt attempts at gerrymandering difficult. But when coupled with the sorting phenomenon discussed above, redistricting probably is contributing to polarization, if only at the margins. Voters in a number of states have become so worried about the problem of gerrymandering that they have tried to deny their legislatures the ability to draw district boundaries.
The hope is that by taking this power away from whichever party controls the state legislature, voters can ensure more competitive districts and fairer electoral outcomes. In , voters in Arizona approved a referendum that created an independent state commission responsible for drafting legislative districts. But the Arizona legislature fought back against the creation of the commission, filing a lawsuit that claimed only the legislature had the constitutional right to draw districts.
Legislators asked the courts to overturn the popular referendum and end the operation of the redistricting commission. However, the U.
Supreme Court upheld the authority of the independent commission in a 5—4 decision titled Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission
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