Just make sure there is someone in front of you. If there is somebody you can focus on it is easier. How far are we going down . We will stop here. One of the things i wanted to point out to you here coming down the steps you will see that the 36 rib trusses that form the superstructure of the dome converge here to the 12 that go up to support the statue of freedom. As you can imagine, trying to merge 36 items into such a small space at the top was too great so every third truss is the one that continues forward and the two that flank it merge into its side for buttressing support. What you also see is the enormous super structure has very slender bands that reach down to suspend the shell below. And it has a very thin element that reaches out to the shape of the exterior dome. The brilliant thing about this design is that the dome is exposed to very harsh conditions on the outside, very cold in the winter, extremely hot in the summer under direct sun. Some plates may approach 130 degrees fahrenheit. But because they are held away from the super structure that heat dissipates in the iron work before it gets to the super structure so the relationship trusses see very little temperature swing during the course of a year which helps to maintain the Structural Integrity of the dome. It does not move that much. But a lot of the damage that we are addressing is in the shells and they are exposed to wide temperature swings, a lot of expansion and when the rust develops between the plates in binds the plates from moving and creates enormous pressure in the iron work which relieves itself by cracking. Most of the work we will be doing in this case in this space will be addressing cracks in the exterior shell. As a huge erector pieces come interesting a foundry they had to mark each pace so they knew at what level of the dome each piece was to go so dont be surprised if you see these marks on every piece as you go down. There was a clear pattern made for each location and it was important it go in at a certain spot and they used the marks to make sure the installers knew where to place it. You will remember in the opening remarks they talked about the acorn finial that had cracked and had to be removed. You will notice there are a series of bolts that go through the plate above the octagonal window there. Is a large ornamental piece that crests that window that. Is where the acorn finial is from. [inaudible] . The crack . [inaudible]. All of that will be preserved. Our goal is to keep as much of the historic fabric as possible. [inaudible] . It will be repaired, yes. There will be 12 of these outriggers that go out into the rotunda that support the netting system that is suspended above the floor. From the rendering you couldnt tell. Is it a net or plastic . A multilayered netting that is meant to capture a load of 500 pounds and more and so we start with a very large net and a layer of slightly smaller netting then a very tight net to catch any small objects. All of that is concealed by a decorative scrim that creates the image of the canopy that you saw in the briefing. Is there a worry that hammering will shake something loose . If a nut were to fall or if there was a broken piece of iron. We want the belt and suspenders safety to protect the public and make sure there is ample construction barriers there to preclude anything from happening. Not that we are expecting it to happen but we want to ensure that it doesnt. Everything, the bracket, the columns and the super structure behind the skin politics was was createdplates in a foundry in baltimore called cool and hunt. Once pool and hunt had finished their work up to the balcony from that point forward all of the work was done by James Fowler Kirkland out of new york. The wires are part of a defunct bird proofing system. We will remove them and install a passive netting system to keep smaller birds from nesting. When we started this project, there was a major water event in the fall of 1990 that deposited a large amount of water on the floor of the rotunda. It is through your investigations that we discovered bird nesting materials and eating on the dome is what clogged the system and caused the water to back up and Cascade National rotunda. We have taken on a series of projects since that time to ensure that the drainage system is never compromised again by debris. And it led to though the development of the master plan and study of the iron work and to the project we are now going to get completed in the next two years. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] we will have prime ministers questions live wednesday 7 00 a. M. They will also continue debate on the nomination of janet yellen to be the Federal Reserve chair. You can follow the senate live on cspan two. The house returns tuesday at two eastern for a pro forma session, they will recess until 6 30. They will mark the start of the second session of the 113th congress. Later in the week, the house plans to vote on two bills related to the federal health care law, one to monitor its implementation and the other to protect personal information on the website. Live Health Coverage on cspan. Live house coverage on c span. The deadlines approaching for the video competition open to high school students. There is 100,000 in total prizes, with the grand prize of 5,000. These are due by january 20. Get more info at student cam. Org. University of akron recently hosted its annual state of the parties conference. Next, one of the discussions from the event, it focuses on the changing electorate as well as some of the factors that have created divisions between the two parties. This is two hours. A much, john. Thank you for having me. I am very excited about this panel. My primary job is to keep everybody in their time limits, but i am sure that i have read all their papers, there really interesting. Im looking forward to the next couple of hours. We will start with to my immediate left, there are three authors on this paper. With us Michael Ensley of Kent State University and Michael Wagner of the university of wisconsin. Gentlemen, i will let you take it from there. Good morning, everybody. We are delighted to be here and thank john green for assembling a great panel and meeting. We thank janet for doing all she did to help us get here and help us get a home when we are done. I guess to help the cspan ,udience feel more comfortable we can hold a 21 hour filibuster and talk until the meeting is over. Our paper is part of an ongoing carmine, mikeed ensley and i have been working how the waywith American Public opinion is reacts to the way the elites structure their preferences. As we begin thinking about what we want to talk about today and the state of the Political Parties and the future of Political Parties, we begin looking at some contemporary from the newes york times. About three years ago in october of 2010, tom friedman wrote a column where he wrote, quoted there is going to be a serious thirdparty candidate in 2012 with a movement behind him are her, one definitely big enough to impact elections outcome. He followed up and said that the former comptroller david walker might he such a candidate. The lack of president walker aside, and on the other side aisle, thelogical day after the column appeared making the argument that the obama realignment might not last the on the next president ial election, which doesnt make it much of a realignment. What strikes us about the way that these folks are thinking about american Political Parties is that the expectation is for major durables sustained dramatic change. The argument we want to make is that people who are looking for that kind of change are going to be waiting a while. What we want to do today is try to make three empirical points that come from a theoretical perspective. The first is that self identifying moderates are polarized from each other. This makes it for difficult for a centrist party to rise and be a Viable Third Party in the United States. Second and finally, the argument we ant to make is that begine our argument, we with evidence from poole and , that congressional elites are reliably divided along a single ideological dimension, a left right dimension. It dominates our elected republicans and democrats cast their votes when they are behaving in congress. Is not so similarly divided, but divided along to principal dimensions, one an economic dimension dealing with the way that Government Spending and regulation is understood and one dealing with social issues, dealing with questions of moral right and wrong. Both of these dimensions have a leftright dimension to them but they dont perfectly overlap. The consequence here are the fundamental question we are interested in is what are the consequences in a political system when it leaves divided along one dimension and the public divided among two. The research we are put together and the book we are wrapping up as he argument that some folks have orthodox preferences. These are people who are either liberal or conservative on both issues. These are people who behave as though there divided along a leftright dimension as members of congress are. These are folks that are polarized partisans, stable parsons, they make their vote choice really early, and engage more cynically, they consume partisan media, they dont split their tickets when they vote. A slightly larger group of voters have heterodox preferences, which is to say they might be liberal on one set of issues and conservative on another set of issues. Folks who are conservative economically liberal socially might libertarian, folks who are conservative socially but liberal economically might be considered populist, and those who are honesttogoodness in the middle might be considered moderate. We make the argument that the heterodox voters participate less him are more unstable and the partisanship, flop back and forth between the parties, dont consume partisan media and split their tickets at a much higher rate when they vote. So to give you a sense of what this looks like, this is the 2012 American National election study. Every dot is a person. On the xaxis are Economic Issues. The y axis is the social dimension. So liberals and conservatives in the lower lefthand and Upper Corners of this figure are polarized. User becoming increasingly divided in the american electorate. These are the folks are more likely to anticipate. Voterstrivial size of are libertarian and populist in their view. It is a fair amount of people who are in the middle with their preferences. What is interesting about the populists, libertarians and moderates is that they are all systematically likely to call themselves moderate when asked to place himself on an ideological scale. If you are very conservative economically and very liberal socially, you are a moderate, and if youre just the opposite, you are a moderate. That makes it very difficult for a thirdparty candidate to corral both of these groups of voters, since they disagree with each other and are as polarized as liberals and conservatives. We argue it will be very difficult for third to appeal to these voters who are quite different from each other, as different as ideological liberals and conservatives. To give a sense of how this might try to operate, we went back in the study to 1992 when fairlyrot ran as a successful thirdparty candidate, getting about 19 of the popular vote, coming in second in maine and utah in the , in our and looking at five ideological groups, where did you rose support come from. Did perot support come from . We have conservatives voting and the likelihood of 27 for ross perot. Libertarians over 35 and moderates a little over 25 . Ross perot ran as a prochoice but no economic regulation candidate, a libertarian set of issue positions and not surprisingly the libertarian voters were the most likely to support ross perot. On the other hand, he was giving these voters exactly what they wanted in general from a policy perspective and yet their likelihood that a libertarian would cast a vote for him was only 35 . Even in the group that matched the independent candidate rest, when he was matching preferences the likelihood of a vote was not so high, speaking to the dominance of the party system in american politics. We think that the freedman argument about the radical center is one we should not worry about too much. This leaves parties with a couple different options. How do we sustain a durable majority over the long haul . You can imagine the parties might say to themselves what we folkso do is appeal to who are not in our core but have a set of issues where they see things our way. Formula papern a from Robert Axelrod that tried to estimate how much support candidates get from particular groups, how large the group is, how loyal they are and how much they turn out. Those are the key elements of axelrods formula. We apply the same formula to our ideological groups. This figure is showing you the percentage of contribution to the vote total for republicans in this case from 19722012. Not surprisingly, conservatives provide the lions share of support and since 1992 have really jumped up in the amount of support they provide for their voters. Where else can conservatives go or republicans, that is, to try to increase their share of the rest of the electorate to become a durable majority . In the interest of time, the short answer for the short term is libertarians. In the last two elections, they have been a larger part of the republican coalition. They turn out at a higher rate than do popular its then do populists and moderates. Theyre a little more likely to support the Republican Party. That is the place where a republicans ought to consider trying to grab votes. Even though we have a two dimensional structure, the Economic Issues correlate most highly with peoples self reported ideology and also are correlated more highly with peoples vote choice. Conservatives match libertarians on Economic Issues and that is perhaps not so surprising. Give the thing to note is that if conservatives have a hard time going after these is not aans, Consistent Group and not a very large group. Think,ublicans might lets just try to grow our core supporters. The reason we didnt win as we were conservative enough. If we can be more conservative and grow our core supporters then maybe we can win an election. But as the analysis we present in a hard to read table i will turnout among conservatives as articles to 80 and in 2012, 86 of the conservative vote went to romney. Theres not a whole lot of room for them to grow the conservative vote. The Republican Party party makes the choice to go after conservatives and will not increase their margins very much. Moving to democrats, the first thing to notice is that liberals not surprisingly make up the largest share of democratic president ial vote choice from 19722012. Really quickly, on the republican side, the scale is up to 60 , here the scale is only up to 50 , so liberals make up a smaller portion of the democrats overall coalition then conservatives make up for the republicans coalition, which is something the democrats need to keep in mind. Likeals are already conservatives with a relatively high turnout group in 2012, 95 voted for brock obama and so the democrats are not growing their coalition by appealing to the last five percent of liberals to push them over a 50 majority for the top. Libertarians are more likely to identify or vote with your can moderates seem to be the best option for democrats to make their case in the future if they try to appeal to different kinds of voters. In the last couple of elections moderates have been more likely to favor democrats. If i can find in my notes the exact numbers can i do it . In five of the last six elections, moderates have given the majority of the votes to democrats. It was 71 in 2012. Immigrants have done a more successful job of solidifying moderate support, whereas the is true for republicans in terms of libertarian voters. Neither of the strategies get. Ither party above 50 given the way that these numbers fluctuate, especially with the it is aroups, very difficult argument, special this0 voter turnout coming from conservatives for republicans or 95 from liberals. If you are abandoning some of the policy positions of your core group, youre risking alienating some of those folks. The parties are in a top position. Two they go after these heterodox voters in a systematic way . And not to make a majority, but if they dont they cant rely on their core supporters to make a durable majority in the future. Our conclusion is that we find the state of the parties are highly polarized at the elite level, polarized under some conditions at the mass level and that leaves parties in our view a small sea of uncertainty for the future. It is a good point to stop. Lan i want to thank john and the institute and the staff here for organizing this meeting and for inviting us here third thank you all for coming. To talk today about a phenomenon i found very interesting in recent american electoral politics and that is polarization. In this case the rise of what i call dollarization of the american electorate. Im going to start off with a stylized facts. Actually, i am going to talk about something i think is really happening in american politics. Thati would hollow would fall under the heading of stylized fact. There has been an increase in partisan polarization in the last 30 or 40 years. Workt think i need to really hard to convince you that is the case. Just in case you are sitting there thinking im not so sure about that, a few things we have seen that show that this trend is happening at the elite level are the growing ideological divide between parties in congress. We have seen lots of evidence of that. Decline of, the the kind of language that is used on the floor and also when our political leaders talk in any forum these days. And perhaps most importantly the growing frequency and intensity of confrontations over budget, and debt ceiling, and president ial appointments that have been going on, most recently with the shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis we had last month. Lots of evidence of that. The question is what about the public . Evidence there is some of gro