...American Democracy: The Importance of Political Participation “Elites” have a great effect on political socialization and participation in America. There are three factors that affect socialization and political participation that stand taller than the rest. First is the limited growth in worker wages. While the wealthy businessmen continue to get richer and the lower class workers continue to get lower wages, the median of the incomes between the two is rising. (Dye) This allows for the minimum wages of lower class workers to keep decreasing and go unnoticed because statistics look at the median wages for Americans when in actuality, it is a combination of average and median values that give more accuracy in the perception of the state of worker wages. Regretfully, this truth is disregarded as many large businesses display those statistics and continue to mask this growing dilemma in our economy. Second, most electorates are completely oblivious about anything going on that does not directly affect them, and often they still don’t know anything about what is greatly affecting them. Because they are uninformed, they do not know of any problems and thus do not particularly care. This is demonstrated by the fact that many support certain institutions in which they do not support the people who run the institutions. (Dye) This is not necessarily due to elitists, but it does continue to drive a wedge further between the elites and the lower class, which is how the elites would...
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...7020 Class Project Does The Taller Presidential Election Candidate Have an Advantage? A Statistical Analysis of Voting Bias Toward Taller Presidential Election Candidates Jared Causey Online MBA Student E.J. Ourso College of Business Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA Abstract After analyzing each presidential election in United States history, a Texas Tech University researcher concluded that a slight bias toward taller presidential candidates exists among the voting population. His claim was based on the theory that through evolution, humans developed a bias toward taller and stronger leaders due to their ability to provide protection. The researcher purports that this bias still exists. In order to test his theory, I collected data regarding candidate height from every United States presidential election with such information readily available. Of the 53 presidential elections at issue, I found the proportion of elections won by the taller candidate to be slightly above 50 percent, suggesting that there is, in fact, a bias toward the taller candidate. Introduction Research suggests that throughout modern and ancient cultures, selection of leaders with more dominant physical traits is prevalent. However, the collective process that leads a voter to choose one candidate over another in a presidential election can depend on a number of variables. Is it then equally likely for a presidential candidate shorter than his opponent to be elected...
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...President Barack Hussein Obama President Barack Obama is one of the most exciting presidential election candidates in many years. It was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago. President Obama is a historical figure in American History because, he became the first successful African-American to become President, and he impacted society in a positive way. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents were divorced when he was only two and the absence of his father greatly affected him. After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. He then entered Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he met Michelle Robinson, an associate at Sidley & Austin law firm in Chicago. On October 3, 1992, he and Michelle were married. They moved to Kenwood, on Chicago's South Side, and welcomed two daughters: Malia born 1998 and Sasha born 2001. In February 2007, Obama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with former first lady and then, U.S. Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. On June 3, 2008, however, Obama became the presumptive nominee for the Democratic party...
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...In the 21th century, social media has become the new movement for presidential elections just as radio and television revolutionized the process in previous elections. The 2008 US election was no exception to the movement, going down in history as the social media election. The Obama campaign was a revolution dedicated to the utilization of social media to connect directly to the American public; their means of communication trigged a change that forever transformed the face of political campaigning. With the ability to communicate with supporters, they fully understood the potency of using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Through social media, they were able to mobilize and encourage supporters’ contribution in the campaign trial, with sites such as meetup.com. Social media also played a part in their fundraising, strategically using social networking sites, the main campaign website MyBarackObama.com, e-mails, text messages, etc. to receive donations. Last but not least, they were able to fully take advantage of the traffic flow to sites such as YouTube and Google to advertise their campaign. Facebook, known as one of the most dominate social networking sites of today’s society with nearly 600 million users. According to ‘Me Media’ by Cassidy(2006,pp.50–59) In 2006 “ Facebook was used at over 2,000 United States colleges and was the seventh most popular site on the World Wide Web with respect to total page views”. It was no coincidence that one Obama’s...
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...Democracy: Alive in America? Everyone is nervously awaiting the final decision of the year 2000 Presidential election with George W. Bush and Al A. Gore running closely side by side. There was debate in the legitimacy of the electoral votes cast in Florida earlier in time, so the suspense rising in America’s final decision is enormous. Looks like Gore holds this trophy for popular votes with a close 543,895 votes winning over Bush. According to previous elections, Gore has this competition conquered, the results come in; George W. Bush is our new president! With a slim win by 5 electoral votes, Bush is our new president. Wait a second, popular vote is that not the votes of qualified voters of the population? In America today, political decisions are decided democratically by its residents. Although Al Gore won the popular vote, George Bush is still the decided president. Then what is democracy, where did it come from, is our current democratic society a progression or is it a regression of democracy’s evolution? America has a government decided by the population of America; at least that is of the idea of a democratic society. Let us then compare American democracy to where democracy was created. The reason why everyone votes is to make a unanimous decision of who will become the leaders of a country. Democracy is just that, a government where the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation...
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...and more. “American society is highly polarized in its perception of the existing election system” (Belenky 2012, ix). This paper has the aim to contrast the arguments against and in favor of the Electoral College and to demonstrate possible alternatives. In the conclusion an answer to the question “Should the Electoral College be reformed?” will be given. 2. How it works The Electoral College, as it is outlined in the 12th Amendment, is a body of electors chosen to elect the President and Vice President of the United States. In Article II of the Constitution the electing procedure is written down. Each state delegates a specific number of electors to the Electoral College, dependent on its representation in Congress (House of Representatives & Senate). According to the fact that each state has two Senators and at least one Representative (dependent on the size of the population in the state), each state has three electors at the minimum (for example Alaska). With 55 electors, California has the largest number at the moment (see illustration 1) (Electoral-vote.com 2013). Figure 1: Blank map of the U.S. with electoral vote Each presidential candidate has his or her own group of electors in every state. Generally the electors are chosen by the respective political party, but there are many differences among the states concerning the selection process of the electors. The election of the President is held...
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...fathers to institute this precaution no longer exist today. Also, the fact that almost all the states use a winner-take-all system to determine which candidate gets all of the electoral votes for the state. Will abolishing the Electoral College rid the United States from mobocracy? Introduction The Electoral College is outdated and does not follow the true spirit of American Democracy. David Stewart (2013), a lawyer in Washington, D.C., states that, “Because most people knew little about public events or leaders from distant states, the convention delegates reasoned, they would not make a wise choice between presidential candidates.” Today, people have access to information through TV, the internet, and social media. People can travel easily around the country. It is extremely difficult to not get bombarded with political campaign ads and political rants during election season. There is a lack of political efficacy in the United States that causes a low voter turnout. If citizens are not voting then the popular vote does not truly represent the majority. The Electoral...
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...suggests, several attempts have been made over the last 50 years to regulate the financing of campaigns, which has been criticised for damaging the election process of democracy in the USA for being too expensive and dominant. Earliest reforms in the 1970s include the 1971 Federal Election Act, and famously, the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act, known by many now as FECA. These congressional acts limited the ability of candidates to spend their own money on campaigns, and limited PAC donations to $5,000 per candidate through the creation of the Federal Election Commission. They also introduced the ‘matching funds system’ to this effect. Far more recent reforms have also taken place to further restrict such donations to candidate campaigning, such as the 2002 Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as ‘McCain-Feingold’ capping the soft money spending by parties and welfare/charity organisations which had increased since the 1970s. This is when money is not directly donated to the candidate and cannot be used for self promotion. The 2002 Act ruled that such organisations can spend up to 49% of their income on parties and campaigns, yet this spending remains undisclosed, allowing anonymity. This highlights one of the main reasons why such reforms have failed to rectify the issues of campaign financing that remains in contemporary elections – many so-called ‘legal loopholes’ have been found in these congressional acts which have allowed soft money and independent expenditures and...
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...The debate in America is based on polarization between the two major political parties: Republican (red states) and Democratic (blue states) Parties. Due to the presidential election results, there’s a division between the states that led to battleground. The "colors" of these states will not change. "While much "red and blue" ink has been spilled over whether elite polarization is mirrored by the public, existing research provides no consensus when it comes to answering this question. On the one hand, some scholars argue that if citizens take cues from party elites—as recent research suggests they do—then they should come to resemble party elites by becoming more ideologically oriented partisans" (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2008; Carsey & Layman, 2006; Hetherington, 2001). James Wilson, a political science...
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...Lincoln was a great statesman, he proved this through the changes he brought not only for the country but for the people as well. He was able to bring together a nation that was divided between the free and the enslaved. Lincoln had the ability to withstand many difficulties that came his way and not be put down every time he came face to face with frustration. He demonstrated his leadership by acknowledging his weaknesses, control his emotions, and ability to communicate his goals and visions for the future. Lincoln, like every other person, had flaws. He was the type of person to not want to hurt anyone, which turned out to be his greatest strength but also his greatest weakness. He was always the type of person to give people second or even third chances, but this weak spot soon showed how disastrous it could be for the entire country. He had a general named George McClellan who was the head of the Union Army and turned out to be insubordinate. Lincoln’s weakness came to show damage when his inability to fire McClellan led to lost wars as stated in the article Leadership Lessons from Abraham Lincoln by Diane Coutu, “But in the end it was his inability to hurt people that made Lincoln keep McClellan on far too long. As a result, battles were lost, and thousands of soldiers died who might have lived had Lincoln fired McClellan earlier.” Lincoln failed to dismiss General McClellan because he didn’t believe he had the ability to run his own military, let alone wage war. He took...
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...After reading the article, "Hillary’s Popular Vote Holdouts on Collision Course with History," I now believe that the electoral college is a more fairer method to determine the outcome of who will be president, rather than based solely on popular votes (initially, I thought this was the better idea). The reason why I changed my perspective is because I believe that the author brings up a good point, in that both California and New York, both strongly democratic and strongly influential, would almost always help a democratic president win, if only using popular vote. With the electoral college, smaller states' votes matter. With this election, these smaller states helped to contribute to a slightly larger amount of electoral votes than New York...
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...lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And this wasn't just random error. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote. In Florida, which Bush ultimately won 52-47, exit polls predicted a dead heat. (These are not early numbers. They're from about midnight eastern time, long after polls closed in Ohio and Florida. And yet by the next afternoon the exit poll numbers online corresponded to the returns. The only way I can imagine this happening is if those in charge of the exit polls cooked the books after seeing the actual returns. But that's another issue.) What happened? The source of the problem may be a variant of the Bradley Effect. This term was invented after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost an election for governor of California despite a comfortable lead in the polls. Apparently voters were afraid to say they planned to vote against him, lest their motives be (perhaps correctly) suspected. It seems likely that something similar happened in exit polls this year. In theory, exit polls ought to be very accurate. You're not asking people what they would do. You're asking what they just did. How can you get errors asking that? Because some people don't respond. To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, every 20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for. But not everyone wants to answer. And the pollsters can't simply ignore those who won't, or their sample isn't random anymore. So what they do, apparently, is note down...
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...the beach were shown. Christie defended his use of the beach closed to the public during New Jersey's government shutdown by saying he had previously announced his vacation plans and the media has simply “caught a politician keeping is word” (Cillizza, 2017). When one of the Governor’s aids was questioned about the Governor sunbathing in the pictures he responded “He didn’t get any sun. He had a baseball hat on” (Cillizza, 2017). Christie later tweeted that 119 of the 130 miles of coastline in New Jersey is now open, come and enjoy them. But use sunscreen and hydrate. To be tweeting and being so sarcastic about the issue shows that Christie has move beyond caring what the people he represent think about him. After Christie’s presidential campaign his approval numbers in the state of New Jersey took a massive hit because of his ties to Trump and partly due to the fact that he wasn’t in the state all that much. A university poll put his ratings at just fifteen percent, the worst approval rating for any governor in any state ever recorded. This story ties into a section in chapter two that talks about let your values guide you. One of the definitions that the dictionary give for values is a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life (www.dictionary.com). Christie has known for months that his state was headed to a government shutdown. If you are going to close the beaches in the state to everyone else why wouldn’t that...
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...Not only does the Electoral College support federalism, it also helps America’s two party system. Arthur Schlesinger states, “The abolition of state-by-state, winner-takes-all electoral votes would speed up the disintegration of the already weakened two party system”(Document E). The Electoral College makes it virtually impossible for third parties to win the election, which can be bad, but for the sake of a two party system, it’s good. America has ran on a two party system with the Electoral College since it was formed, and that is what has worked. Also, the Electoral College can help if there are problems in the popular vote. Say that the popular vote is close to a tie, the electoral vote can be entirely different. A chart shows that in the 1980 Presidential Election, Reagan got 50.7% of the popular vote, Carter got 41% of the popular vote, and Anderson got only 6.6% of the popular vote. Although the numbers were close to 50% for the two majority parties, the electoral votes were 91%, 9%, and 1% respectively (Document B). The electoral vote changed the difference from a mere 9.7% to an 82% difference. It keeps the two party system strong and it can potentially keep from needing a recount of votes. Almost 250 years later, the two party system is what still works, so it is important to keep that, as well...
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...President Trump has started off his first term in a direct and aggressive way. He is doing what he said and told people he was going to do. However, some are not all going over well with people. A big topic that has been controversial has been Trumps travel ban. President Trump submitted an executive order making a travel ban for 7 Muslim majority countries. Those countries include Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. This would be a ban that was originally set out to be upheld up for 90 days. With president Trump creating a travel ban this would stop former president Obama’s goal of accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees. Trump wants to be able to validate people coming into the country and seen as if his best option was to install a travel ban until he can figure out how to do so. Trump installing a travel ban may have an effect on the relationships we have between some of those countries. For example, former president Barack Obama, was working on building a better relationship with Iran. After the travel ban it will have impacted our relationship with them in a negative way. Libya used to be one of the wealthiest nations in Africa several years back. Do to hardship and war their wealth has declined drastically. Libya has been a place where multiple ISIS camps have been seen and found recently. Earlier this year two ISIS camps were destroyed in Libya leading trump to determine that Libya was one of the countries that definitely needed to be one the travel...
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