POLI 1090 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Cuban Americans, Asian Americans, Wasted Vote
22 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Collective choice in government : as permanent coalitions in policy-making processes, parties facilitate action: As individual political actors sharing a label, members are incentivized to work together. While there are disagreements among those actors, they have more in common than with the other party: action would be unthinkable in congress without parties. Dealing with the problem of ambition : unchecked ambition is a problem for the political system: Parties channel ambition through a system of career advancement. Parties allow for the internal resolution of con ict through primaries: because party members share a brand name, con ict is effectively contained. What are political parties: american two-party system: Winner takes all single-member districts: if candidate wins by 20% or 0. 001%, the election has the same result. Losing party gets no representation from that speci c district. Unlike proportional representation systems: multimember districts/states, party wins number of seats in proportion to the share of votes won in election.
