A House Divided? Roll Calls,Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.     

Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating “alternative facts” throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the “post-factual world” account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017.     

The End of Sprawl? Not so Fast

This article takes a careful look at the recent state of sprawl among America’s 178 largest metropolitan areas through the lens of four sets of questions: (a) Measured at the metropolitan level, is sprawl really declining? Is it declining everywhere, or just in selected metropolitan areas? (b) If sprawl is indeed declining, are more compact growth forms on the rise? (c) If sprawl is indeed declining, is it the result of antisprawl land use and development policies? (d) Which metropolitan-level land market, demographic, and economic factors are most associated with changes in sprawl? It concludes that sprawl is indeed declining when measured by average population densities, but that the decline has been much less widespread if measured in terms of population growth in core-area neighborhoods, changing density gradient intercept and slope estimates, and increased employment clustering. In terms of policy, it finds no evidence that local regulatory regimes or growth management programs have had any effect on sprawl, but finds that the consistent administration of local regulatory programs in ways that incentivize infill development and send consistent signals to developers does contribute to reduced sprawl.     

Fiscal Austerity and Rental Housing Policy in the United States and United Kingdom, 2010–2016

After the 2008 global financial crisis, both the United States and the United Kingdom introduced austerity policies targeted at particular elements of their national budgets. The purpose of this article is to compare the nature of this retrenchment; the similarities and differences in how it was implemented; and its initial impacts on one of the expenditure areas particularly affected: affordable rental housing programs and housing support for low-income households. Using a wide range of data sources, we find evidence of political and fiscal policy analogies in the timing and forms of the initial policy choices and how these were modified in the face of economic and political pressures. There are considerable similarities both in the instruments used to reduce housing expenditures and in the early impacts on support mechanisms and recipients. However, we find different histories and trajectories of support between the two countries that suggest that the longer term differences in outcomes may be more important.     

EU Simulations and Engagement: Motivating Greater Interest in European Union Politics

While the effects of simulation-based courses on the knowledge of participating students may be marginal in relation to standard lecture and discussion-based courses, this article argues that the greatest leverage is gained by increasing participating students’ level of interest in the subject of study and in politics more broadly. Participants tend to become increasingly absorbed in their roles and in the politics of the institutions at the center of the simulation. To better consider this possibility, we conducted a survey of students participating in the 2015 Mid-Atlantic European Union Simulation and of appropriate control populations. The survey results indeed suggest that, much more than simply acquiring knowledge about the EU, the simulation experience serves to generate more robust interest in the subject of study.     

Transatlantic Institutions: Can Partnership be Engineered?

The transatlantic alliance is widely viewed as being in a state of decline. Conflict over the war in Iraq highlighted a growing divergence between the Bush administration and European Union governments in their attitudes towards multilateralism. The rift severely tested institutions created to manage bilateral EU–US relations in the aftermath of the cold war. This article examines how well this institutional architecture has held up. It scrutinises the limitations of networked governance in transatlantic relations and acknowledges the quandary of trying to manufacture partnership using imperfect institutions. The Brussels–Washington channel is only one among many through which transatlantic relations flow, but we argue that it continues to gain in importance. Despite the limits of institutional engineering, we conclude that the US and the EU remain each other's most important ally.     

The collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan: An analysis of its roots and its prospects for revival

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had profound economic and social effects on many of the newly independent transition economies. Nowhere was this more so than in the fisheries sector – with one of the biggest production shortfalls occurring in Kyrgyzstan, following the collapse of lake capture and pond-culture production. In 2005, aggregate landings were just 48 tonnes – barely 3 per cent of the catch level recorded in 1989. This article has two objectives. First it analyses the extent to which the dissolution of the Soviet Union can explain the collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan. Second, in the light of these findings, it considers what practical steps, if any, might be taken to revitalize the sector.