Date:
September 10, 2010 - 12:15pm
Speaker(s):
Bob Packwood, Former Oregon Senator and Founder, Sunrise Research Corporation
At their best, partisanship and the two-party system allow people with competing goals to work more easily together: when sufficiently constrained, conflict between political parties can be informative and productive. Excessive partisanship, however, can undermine effective lawmak¬ing and interfere with the Legislature's ability to func¬tion. In today's political climate, excessive partisanship too often seems the rule rather than the exception - but this was not always the case.