Politics

What is social democracy? Dynamic capitalism plus liberal democracy plus an effective social safety net.

Is wealth inequality corrosive for democracy, and if so what then? It’s complicated . . .

Even though I’m not a candidate for office, I’m going to take a shot at answering seven questions raised by Jason Booms.

I start a new series of semi-random posts on political themes for the 21st century.

Howard County, Maryland precinct cartogram. Precinct area is proportional to the number of registered voters as of the 2014 general election. Click for higher-resolution version. tl;dr: The map of Howard County looks very different if you’re looking for votes. Cartograms help you see like a politician. There are 118 election precincts in Howard County, Maryland, varying both in geographic area and in the number of voters they contain. Precincts in western Howard County tend to be larger, because the population density in western Howard is lower. Precincts in more densely populated areas of the county (including Columbia) tend to be smaller. If we’re interested in how voters behave across the county a conventional map can be misleading because the larger area of western Howard precincts causes us to overrate the importance and impact of those precincts. (This is similar to the US electoral map being visually dominated by large states like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas that have fewer voters than small states like Connecticut and Rhode Island.) ...