In U.S. Politics, Party Rule Flips Like Clockwork

In U.S. Politics, Party Rule Flips Like Clockwork
Devin Powell, Discovery News

March 13, 2008 -- Democrats, take heart. The latest Republican ascendancy, which began when the party took over the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, may be coming to an end -- according to new research in the field of political science.

If history is any judge, party power in American politics seems to switch back and forth at consistent, predictable intervals.

A team of three researchers looked at every election since 1854 and tallied the percentage of seats in the House and Senate won by each party.

To find patterns in this data, Samuel Merrill III, a mathematician at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., borrowed a tool from astronomers: spectral analysis, a statistical method usually used to find repeating cycles in sunspots.

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http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/13/political-cycles.html

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