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Choreography Of American Politics Chapter 1 Summary

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Chapter one is titled the Choreography of American Politics. The purpose of the chapter is to provide a description of how income inequality and political polarization evolved during the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. In this chapter they introduce a system they have called NOMINATE. They used NOMINATE to measure political polarization in the House and Senate. Each legislator gets a score on where they are on a liberal conservative spectrum. This gives perspective to how polarized congress is. After introducing NOMINATE, the authors explain three measures of inequality. These measures are the income that goes to the top 1%, the amount of foreign born population, and the Gini coefficient. They express these measures of inequality …show more content…

This chapter focuses on other possible explanations for increased political polarization and then explain how they don’t account for increased polarizations. The authors give plenty of possible counterarguments for their audience to consider and then show why they are right by shutting those counterarguments down with an overwhelming amount of evidence. They introduce counterarguments like intraparty competition during primaries, partisan congressional reforms, redistricting, and Southern Realignment. Intraparty competition during primaries does not show significant differences in legislators for there to be a solid argument. There are statistics that show that polarization would have been unaltered even without changes in partisan congressional reforms. Polarization has been as extreme in the House as the Senate. The Senate has not been subject to any redistricting either. As for Southern Realignment, the north shows just as much polarization, where no realignment has occurred. This chapter had the best argument to make me believe that their main argument was true. The roundabout way they attacked the counterarguments was very …show more content…

The argument in this chapter is focused around how income inequality has caused voters to demand policies that redistribute income and wealth downward from the wealthy. This has been caused by a few different things according to the authors. Data shows that voters and nonvoters have a significant difference in income. This is because the bottom of income distribution consists of poor immigrants who aren’t citizens and have no voting rights. There was an explosion in immigration from poorer countries. Data also suggests that republican legislators have moved far to the right while democratic legislators have moved modestly to the left. This chapter was based on data that the authors collected as evidence for their main argument. This chapter felt like a place where the authors dumped a bunch of evidence and then tried to connect it to their points. They did well but I feel like they could have been more clear and concise in their

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