PPI Senior Fellow Anne Kim writes for The Hill on the record number of women running for Congress and their potential impact on Capitol Hill:

More than 300 women, a record high, have filed to run for Congress this year, which means a likely gain of female members come November. In addition to greater parity for women–who’ve been chronically underrepresented–more women in Congress could bring another benefit: Less gridlock.

Female senators have a markedly more bipartisan vote record than their male peers do. Moreover, studies in personality research find that women are more cooperative than men, more willing to compromise, more empathetic and, moreover, more polite.

As Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University puts it: “Women are more likely to work across the aisle and find compromise.”

Read the entire article HERE.

PPI President Will Marshal explains why Bill Clinton’s contributions to restoring the language of civic obligation are so frequently overlooked over at Democracy:

“In “Restoring the Language of Obligation,” [Issue #24] James Kloppenberg laments “the ignorance of most Americans about the centrality of the concept of obligation in American history.” Yet there’s a gaping hole in his own synopsis of that history—the 1990s, when civic themes re-entered the nation’s political discourse in a big way”

“Invocations of civic duty and the disinterested pursuit of the common good were touchstones of American politics from colonial days until around the 1970s, says Kloppenberg, when liberals “traded the language of duties for the language of rights.” He argues persuasively that the ensuing fixation with rights talk and identity politics sped the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, and, by eroding more expansive notions of social solidarity, abetted the rise of Ronald Reagan’s anti-government populism.”

“But there his recap ends, skipping the striking period of civic ferment that followed. In politics, for example, Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” consciously sought to reclaim the civic-republican tradition. Concepts like mutual obligation, community, and national service, and balancing citizens’ rights with their responsibilities, were central to the nation’s political conversation in the 1990s, and even migrated abroad via the “third way” dialogue between Clinton, Tony Blair, and other center-left political leaders.”

Read the entire article HERE.