Ballot access for third parties

Third parties often have to battle established institutions in order to get their candidates listed on ballots in national and state elections. Ballot Access News is an online newsletter that describes what it calls the "trials and tribulations" of individuals who attempt to gain ballot access. The newsletter is located at http://www.ballot-access.org/. Go to the Ballot Access News web site and link to the October 4, 1998 issue. There you will find a short story on a court challenge from a minor party candidate in Ohio who attempted to get on the ballot. After reading this piece, link to the January 1, 2000 issue for a follow-up report on this same case. Because they control state legislatures, and thus ballot-access procedures, some observers argue that the major parties have conspired to make it difficult for minor parties to gain access to the ballot. How did Ohio's dual system of ballot access-which was successfully challenged according to the Ballot Access News-lend support to these criticisms?




Party ideology in the US Congress

Professor Keith Poole is a political scientist at the University of Houston who has devoted much of his career to studying the ideological orientations of the political parties in Congress. He maintains a web site at http://voteview.uh.edu/ with animations of some of his research based on a measurement that he has developed called "Nominate Scores." These scores essentially calculate the ideological orientations (i.e. liberal to conservative) of members of Congress based on their roll call voting record. Go to Professor Poole's site and follow the link to his Data Download page. There you will find a link to his General Data Collection, which includes animated "gif" files of Congress from the 1800s to the present. Run the "One Dimensional Animated Gif for the 46th to 105th Houses" file to observe how the ideological characteristics of the parties have changed over time. Based on the animation, what would be your overall conclusion about the ideological differences between the parties? Looking specifically at the periods from roughly 1954 to 1978 and 1988 to 1998, would you conclude that the parties have become more or less ideologically polarized? Explain your answer.