Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

I recently completed a study of voter turnout in the 2016 city council elections, comparing voter turnout in 2014 with 2016. As expected, since “timing is everything” in explanations of voter turnout in municipal elections, voter turnout increased significantly. Overall, voter turnout increased by 14.63 percent, which is less than the most recent difference in voter turnout between a midterm and presidential election in Texas—an almost 23 percent higher voter turnout. Also, in both 2014 and 2016, the district with the highest voter turnout was District 10 with nearly 55 percent of registered voters participating. However, the district with the lowest voter turnout in 2014 was District 6 whereas the district with the lowest voter turnout in 2016 was District 2 with slightly more than 37 percent. Source: Calculated from Travis County Election Results. Percentage of registered voters. ...

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I’ve mentioned before that Samuel P. Huntington’s American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony has had a tremendous impact on how I think about politics. The five ideas that form the basis of American politics—individualism, liberty, equality, democracy, and constitutionalism—and, especially the paradigm of political change proffered in the book, ground my understanding of American politics. Huntington argues that Americans experience cognitive dissonance because the institutions of the society that they’ve created can never fully incorporate the five ideas, which are ideals. Fully incorporating the five ideas in the social institutions is impossible because of the inherent conflict among the five ideals. This impossibility does not prevent Americans from trying to achieve the ideal during certain periods of American history.  Huntington notes four responses to the gap between the ideal of incorporating all five ideas and the existing reality—what Huntington terms the...