Carlo Prato (Georgetown) and Stephane Wolton (Chicago): The Voters' Curses: The Upsides and Downsides of Political Engagement. Joshua Zingher (SUNY-Binghamton): An Analysis of the Changing Social Bases of America's Political Parties: 1952-2008. Zoltan L. Hajnal and Jeremy D. Horowitz (UCSD): Racial Winners and Losers in American Party Politics. David C. Kimball, Bryce Summary, and Eric C. Vorst (Missouri): Political Identify and Party Polarization in the American Electorate. Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution? Chris Mooney reviews Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences by John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford and Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us by Avi Tuschman. Does money make people conservative? Andrew Gelman on leading to a discussion of different default models held by economists and political scientists. The Republicans have concluded that the path to electoral victory isn’t to craft the better campaign or come up with appealing policies, but to control the shape of the electorate by making it smaller. Study finds strong evidence for discriminatory intent behind voter ID laws: Legislators who support strict ID requirements are more racially biased than those who don’t. Democrats, stop fighting voter ID laws. John Sides on why weird congressional districts can be good congressional districts. Facebook could decide an election without anyone ever finding out: Jonathan Zittrain on the scary future of digital gerrymandering and how to prevent it. Computer programmer Brian Olson solved gerrymandering in his spare time; we could take human error out of the redistricting process entirely — why don't we?
