Just in time for U.S. mid-term elections, there’s a new measure of the partisan rancor in Washington.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank yesterday inaugurated a monthly index of political discord, putting a number to what most Americans already know: their government has been unusually fractious during the past several years.
The index does bring one surprising bit of news: Partisan conflict has been easing since May and is down 54 percent from a record level a year ago, when a deadlock between Republicans and Democrats shut down the U.S. government.
Battles in Washington are being tracked because they may themselves be one cause of the country’s slow recovery from the 2008 financial crash, according to the index’s developer, Marina Azzimonti, a former Philadelphia Fed economist who’s now an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
via It’s Official: Partisan Rancor Worst in Over a Century – Bloomberg.
