Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

Waiting for the Pendulum to Swing….We want to first thank Kevin for giving us access to this terrific forum. We emerge with some good new ideas, a great deal of helpful feedback, and a huge amount of new respect (and we already had a lot) for the efforts of serious bloggers. The two objections Kevin […]

Is there a puzzle?….Kevin raises some important issues in his last, agreeably skeptical post. And, ironically?given that he?s the political commentator and we?re the political scientists?he mounts a spirited and thoughtful defense of the traditional political science view: namely, that pushing politics and policy off center for any length of time inevitably creates gridlock and […]

The Road Back, Part II…We wrote Off Center to try and understand not just why the GOP has risen to power, but also why a very conservative elite has been able to advance its radical agenda while so effectively evading political accountability. (Note that we say ?advance a radical agenda,? not fulfill it. As we […]

The Road Back….The 2006 elections are shaping up as a potential watershed. We know, every election feels that way nowadays, but this time it?s true?really. Since January, Republicans have staged a dismally instructive clinic on how not to govern (Social Security, Schiavo, Katrina). These missteps have coincided with the arrival of ?political payment overdue? slips […]

A Surprising Fact…As we were going back to the National Election Studies data to clarify the “mystery graph,” we came across a simple table that cannot help but surprise those who have watched American politics shift steadily to the hard right. The table on the National Election studies website (reprinted below) tracks the “liberal-conservative index” […]

Back to the Center?….Kevin asks: How long do you think this can last before the center finally pulls back? Or has American politics changed so fundamentally that it will stay off center forever unless Democrats adopt tactics similar to Republicans’? In other words, what’s your best guess: do Democrats need to fight fire with fire? […]

The Mystery Graph….We have put up a short post on TPMCafe explaining how we produced the figure on p. 27 of Off Center (the figure is reproduced by Kevin here) which shows that Republican activists — always farther from independent voters on a liberal-conservative scale than Democratic activists — have moved even farther away in […]

What about 9/11? Having read the comments thus far — and let us say right away that this is a very, very sharp crowd — we’ve decided that three issues require immediate elaboration: the role of 9/11, our definition of the center, and the prospects for a big reversal in the near future. In this […]

Why is American Politics Off Center? We are very grateful to Kevin for offering this chance to discuss the current state of American politics. It?s gratifying that astute political analysts like Kevin, Chris Hayes, Henry Farrell, Mark Schmitt, Mathew Yglesias, and Paul Krugman (who has a column discussing our book in today?s Times) find our […]