What are the parties disagreeing on? Whatever there is to vote on, which is all a legislator can disagree upon--- if there is no amendment offered on socializing the oil company, it really doesn't matter whether a candidate would have voted for it, does it?
As with most statistics, the interesting information is not what the split in parties means in any year, but the trend over time. And what is most interesting is that in mid-century and immediately after, it was hard to see any clearcut divide between the parties, as conservative Dems mixed on the graph with liberal Republicans. What is interesting is that the defections of Southern Dems to the GOP visually reveals the increasing polarizaiton of votes between the parties.
Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Jannuzi" <jannuzi at edu00.f-edu.fukui-u.ac.jp> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 1:24 AM Subject: Fw: Visualizing Congress
Nathan Newman writes:
>As the note below observes,
>the parties are far more polarized >in voting patterns today than any
>period since the last century.
>Folks can pretend there is little >differece but maybe a visual
>demonstration will help.
I don't know. What issues are they disagreeing on? Whether we shouldn't get this form of healthcare or whether we shouldn't get that form of healthcare?
It's like Yankees and Red Sox fans: they don't agree on anything face to face but their lives and world views are largely the same. And the bigger money team wins more. .
I couldn't make any sense of the graphic you sent us to. It wouldn't sit still long enough for me to even see what it was supposed to be showing me. It did look something like the map of the genome.
I tried reading the professor's probative paper and here is a sample theorem:
>>Theorem: If Voting is Perfect in One Dimension, then the First
Eigenvector Extracted From the Double Centered p by p Matrix of Squared
Distances from Equation (3) has at Least the Same Weak Monotone Rank
Ordering as the Legislators.<<
Wow, nate.org is into hardcore political science now, too! American politics, weak monotone...Oh, I get it.
Charles Jannuzi