On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 08:41:43AM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I know that "the Dems have moved to the right" is a standard line,
> but relative to what? Political scientists who code these things find
> more differences between the two parties now than they were several
> decades ago. Take this, for example, from a paper by Jeffrey
> Stonecash ("The Income Gap," PS: Political Science and Politics, July
> 2006 <http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJuly06Stonecash.pdf>): "Figure
> 2 presents party differences using the DW-NOMINATE scores developed
> by Keith Poole. Differences were relatively great during the first
> half of the 20th century and then gradually declined from the 1940s
> through most of the 1970s. Then the differences began to increase,
> and they are now as great as they were a hundred years ago.... Voters
> have recognized these growing differences. As Figure 3 indicates,
> respondents in national surveys increasingly say they see differences
> between the two par ties and care about who wins the presidential
> election." It might be that the people most likely to say the Dems
> have moved right don't want to say the Reps have moved even further
> to the right, which has widened the relative difference between the two.
>
> And what about absolutes? The Dem party of old may have given us the
> New Deal, but it also gave us the CIA, loyalty oaths, the Dixiecrats,
> and the Vietnam war.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com