Keith Poole is a major figure among political scientists, having gathered data on every significant congressional vote since time immemorial and analyzed those voting patterns. I just realized that he has put a ton of data and analysis online. It's fasacinating stuff. Here are his data on polarization (note that party polarization is at its highest level since reconstruction). Here is his paper finding that gerrymandering does not cause polarization, and here is his paper finding that members of Congress adopt a consistent ideological position and maintain it over time.
But what spurred me to write this post are his data on the ideological mapping of Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Bush. The analysis shows very little distance between Obama and Clinton (both slightly to the left of the middle of their party), but what's really interesting to me is the gap between Bush and McCain, and in particular how far to the right Bush is. Also interesting is how McCain's voting party moved him to the left of his party as the parties became more polarized. Of course, a single left-right axis flattens out a fair amount of complexity, but they also have two-axis measures that capture more, and in any event their data still capture a fair amount. (If you want more on the reliability, validity, and signficance of Poole's data, there's tons on that. His numbers have been used for so long, by so many political scientists, that just about every aspect of them has been considered exhaustively.)
Thanks for the post. This is interesting information and I'm a sucker for data viz.
KWC - you'd be amazed at what's possible on the Internets.
Well, that can't be right, because Prof. Somin says Obama is a far-left liberal.
They baldy state at one point that they consider economic libertarianism right wing. So unless I am mistaken, all Bush being out there on the tail means is that he takes the opposite side of the Democratic Party most consistently, which is not the same as being most conservative.
This is unadulterated hogwash.
If gerrymandering doesn't matter, then why do incumbent politicians fight tooth and nail to carefully draw each Congressional boundary, carefully scrutinizing the census data in every city, town and precinct?
In fact, gerrymandering allows politicians to select their voters, rather than allowing the voters to select their Representatives. Gerrymandering is undemocratic, un-American, and the sole reason that Congresscritters get elected in the same general percentages every two years as the old Soviet Politburo.
It looks like they not only rank a politician's ideology with a single number, but that they derive this number from a single standard where laissez-faire economics = conservative. And of course we have to take their coding of each vote on faith.
It may be that Obama is the ninth-most economically interventionist Senator, but I don't see how you can get a good rank of "liberal-ness" after you throw out all of the culture war stuff. And the foreign wars stuff. I would also think you would see McCain move rightward if you factored those things back in.
Finally, I'm skeptical that you can feed numbers into the same system to get a ranking for Senators and Presidents, since their roles are so different.
This whole thing reeks of pre-determined result and data shaping. The big emphasis on "income inequality" is a big tipoff that there is a socialist agenda at work here. The only reason to even raise the idea of income inequality as a political issue is to suggest the "solution" of redistributing wealth.
I also think that the lack of "polarization" in the pre-80s decades was mainly due to the fact that all information was controlled by a tiny oligarchy (big 3 TV networks and a few major newspapers, no talk radio or internet) that had total control of what stories ran and what stories remained hidden from the public view. Polarization only erupted because people realized what their elected representatives were up to and fought back.
Presidents always look like extremists. They express preferences on too few votes, and those are too politically salient. I wouldn't put much weight on the precise placement of Bush, but to the right of McCain is certainly plausible given recent behavior.
The ideological mapping probably took into account his STATED positions . . .
Does anyone really believe George looked at any of the provided links? Gorge is not a moderate or mainstram Volokh Conspiracy reader.
How many votes is his immigration sponsorship worth then? Or BiCRA for that matter?
Pot/kettle.
The Republicans have been trending leftward since Reagan's second term. In 8 years, we'll see Lieberman run on the GOP Ticket. But so long as people call him a conservative, it should work out.
I guess the same follows for Obama being a hard-left democrat.
And if he's not Conservative, he's liberal!
Also, I'm working on something where the more I dislike someone, the more liberal they are.
There is no indication of whether the two parties moved apart, one moved and the other remained stationary, or whether the two parties moved in the same direction, but one moved faster than the other.
If you are going to answer the question "why the increased polarization", you need to know how the parties moved against some fixed point, not simply how they moved relative to each other.
Ha! Good one, Nieporent.
When one looks at the rankings I suggest using, Obama is far more left and McCain far more centrist than these ad hoc indexes constructed by leftward leanining academics.
It's sad when something ridiculous enough to be parody is indistinguishable from reality.
Add the other half of that reality, and you've got the phenomenon noted by the study.
Nice to meet you, cauldron!
Agreed.
Answers will be posted on the faculty bulletin board after class.
Even if we take their data at face value, it shows only correlation, not causation. They speculate - rather wildly, I think - on the causation but don't provide evidence. They draw conclusions up through 2006 even though their economic data mostly goes only to 1999. They chop and squish their graphs at carefully selected places to create a more dramatic impression. The linked-through interviews and commentary consistently portray Republicans as having moved to the right, but their own graphs show the Democrats moving left and Republicans holding steady.
When Franks is cited as a source, you know that something in their thinking isn't too rigorous.
To their credit, they do show some interesting interactions with immigration policy and public opinion.
-m
Exactly.
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