On Wed, 9 Jan 2002 07:20:34 -0500 "Nathan Newman" <nathan at newman.org>
writes:
> It's a pretty simple animated graph-- it shows how much individuals
> votes
> are different from either their own parties' positions or the mean
> of the
> other parties' votes over a hundred year period.
>
> 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?
Isn't that the point in contention here? The fact that a rather limited range of issues upon which there is only a limited range of disagreement ever comes into play in our political system. I would suggest that Charles Jannuzi is correct. Despite the statisitical polarization between the two major parties, there is little fundamental divergence between them in terms of worldviews. The Democrats are not about to propose legislation for nationalizing the oil companies nor even for taking over the healthcare industry any time soon.
Jim F.
>
> 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
>
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