Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

Here are the Ages of the Party Identifiers from the April 2017 Texas Lyceum Poll. There are a few interesting facts that emerge: young people (18 to 29 years old) are much more likely to be independents; Democrats are older than one would imagine (75 percent are 45 years old and older); and 50 percent of Republicans are 45-64 (74 percent are 45 years old and older).

The Texas Lyceum Poll of 1007 Adult Texans in April 2017 produced the following results in terms of party identification. A special thank you to Joshua Blank for providing the data for the crosstabs on Party identification and other variables. The question was: PID: Do you consider yourself to be a Democrat, a Republican, or neither? I have substituted “independent” for neither since that is the definition of an independent. This result is somewhat different from the results of the Texas Lyceum Poll of 2015. The percentage of independents is 10 percent fewer, and the percentage of Republicans is 6 percent more. The percentage of Democrats is nearly the same. The ideological self-identification of each category of partisanship

Stephen Pimpare wrote in the Washington Post : In response to a question about his party’s plan to increase the cost of health insurance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) suggested that people should “invest in their own health care” instead of “getting that new iPhone.” He doubled-down on the point in a later interview : “People need to make a conscious choice, and I believe in self-reliance.” Of course, Chaffetz is wrong. But he isn’t alone. While he has been met with justifiable derision for the comparison (Christopher Ingraham walked through the math for us, pointing out that a year’s worth of health care would equal 23 iPhone 7 Pluses in price), the claim he is making is hardly new. Chaffetz was articulating a commonly held belief that poverty in the United States is, by and large, the result of laziness, immorality and irresponsibility. If only people made better choices — if they worked harder, stayed in school, got married, didn’t have children they couldn’t afford, spen...

The US Supreme Court ruled long ago in Davis v. Bandemer (1986) that partisan gerrymandering is a justiciable issue; however, the court in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004) failed to provide a measure that could be applied in cases involving alleged partisan gerrymandering. In a Wisconsin case that is headed for the US Supreme Court, a three-judge US District Court panel determined that the legislature had engaged in partisan gerrymandering and adopted a test developed by Stephanopolous and McGhee in a law review article . The measure—the efficiency gap—tallies the wasted votes by each party in electoral contests for legislative seats. In a paper by Eric Petry, the method of calculating the efficiency gap is provided.   Using this method, I calculated the efficiency gap for the 52 House contests that included two major party candidates in 2016. Here are the calculations: In the first step, Petry’s method requires the calculation of votes for each political party’s candidat...