Jonathan Bernstein: “I think the emphasis on partisan polarization is misplaced. There’s nothing about strong partisanship that makes effective government in the U.S. impossible… Indeed: I suspect the game theorists might actually find that it should be easier for two well-organized parties to cut those deals, even if their ideal points are quite distant, than it would be to reach a deal between unstructured, factionalized parties, even if there are no extremists among them… And yet: dysfunction, crises, threats of shutdown and irrational outcomes no one claims to want.”
“My conclusion? It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism. It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken.”
Wonk Wire looks at a new paper on political dysfunction from Rick Hasen.
