question set 5

Overview

No plagiarism or AI. Only use information that I provided.

Instructions from Syllabus:

• Each week, a set of open-ended questions that cover the course material will be due. Each set will contain between five and ten separate questions, each asking you to discuss and reflect upon the course material from the prior week of material.
• These are open to all course materials, and you may discuss the content with me or your classmates. However, you must independently write your own answers, and your responses will be fed through Turnitin. The use of generative AI is not permitted in any form, and outside materials should not be consulted.
• Each question in each set will be graded on a coarse 0-5 scale, and all questions will be weighted together for this portion of your grade, meaning that each set may count slightly more or less than the others depending on the number of questions. Each question in each set should require no more than several hundred words of response maximum.

Overview Video for Week 5Links to an external site. (contains some further explanation of the questions)

Questions

1. Why do we have parties? What roles do they play in a representative democracy? How can these roles be beneficial? How can they be harmful? Why does the US have only two major political parties? Make sure and explain the various incentives that reinforce this two-party system.
2. When we discuss “the party,” what different parts/faces of the party could we mean? How do these differ? How have these differed in power in recent history?
3. How have the US parties evolved through history? Briefly describe each party system and some of its characteristics. Compared to history, how functional are US parties today? Describe at least one positive feature and one negative feature of modern American parties.
4. Are we polarized? Why is this a hard question to answer? What type of people are most polarized on ideological grounds? Of the various types of partisan polarization, which do you believe has the worst implications, and why?
5. Discuss at least three factors McCarty discusses that may have led to increased polarization. How? Why is it hard to pinpoint a singular cause? Make sure and highlight the differences between polarization and sorting. How does this make the parties look more ideologically extreme?