IN NINE OF America’s 13 congressional elections between 1994 and 2018, the Republican Party won a greater share of seats than votes. In 2012, Democrats failed to garner a majority of seats while winning a broad popular vote victory. Even in the 2018 mid-terms, which were described as a “wave” election, The Economist predicted that the Democrats had to win the popular vote in the House of Representatives by 5-6 percentage points to obtain a bare majority of seats. In the Senate, the situation is worse because of the way states magnify the pro-rural bias of America’s electoral institutions.

Hoover Institution fellow Jonathan Rodden discusses the political divisions within the United States. One of the starkest is the fault line that runs between the rural and urban regions of the country, and the history of this geographical split as well as the profound consequences it has had for politics in the US. His recent book goes into further detail about this divide, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide.

A number of political observers are still dissecting the 2016 campaign for answers to how Donald Trump beat 16 Republican rivals and Hillary Clinton to take the presidency.

European voters turned their backs last weekend on mainstream political parties that had controlled their nations for much of the past century. Impressive numbers voted instead for populist (i.e., hate-mongering) outfits that make immigration and cultural conflict their main issues, or for Green parties that focus on ecology and the dangers of climate change. Conservatives and Social Democrats became, at least for now, statistical remnants of a fast-receding past in which arguments about capital, labor and taxes were dominant political messages.