> >>>> the partisan divide in Congress now is far greater than it was
> >>>> 30 or 40 years ago
> http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/congress-hits-new-peak-in-polarization-20110224
>
> A longer-term academic one:
>
> http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/extensions/fall2005/Poole.pdf
>
> with updates:
>
> http://voteview.com/dwnomin_joint_house_and_senate.htm
It's a little confusing, this material. The exact procedure is not quite clear to me, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they did something like this:
1) For every roll-call vote (which of course excludes the votes by acclamation that frequently determine the outcome), the researchers decided whether a Yea or a Nay on that particular vote was more 'liberal' or 'conservative'.
2) They then accumulated scores on individual 'legislators' in Congress, these scores being essentially a ratio of the times each individual Solon cast the 'liberal' vote over the times s/he cast the 'conservative' vote. Perhaps the individual votes were weighted somehow, but just how does not clearly appear, after an afternoon's reading.
3) Do a time series by party. Voila, it turns out that party-line voting is becoming more common -- a dire state of affairs which the authors ominously refer to as 'parliamentary'. What this means is that you're seeing fewer and fewer Democrats whose lifetime average falls farther 'conservative' than the most 'liberal' Republican, and contrariwise.
5) None of this has any bearing on the question of whether the parties are closer together or farther apart in a substantive way, or whether the 'center' has moved to the right or to the left -- much less how. It simply tells us whether the parties have dissimilated more or less; whether the region of overlap has expanded or shrunk.
Have I got it more or less right? If so, 'polarization' in this narrow sense seems a deeply uninteresting phenomenon, except for people who draw a paycheck from the Guelphs or the Ghibellines.
Whoops, sorry, Republicans or Democrats.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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